TurboTime Podcast: Energy Transport and Storage with the Myth Busters

In this episode of the TurboTime Podcast, the Myth Busters discusses the role of turbomachinery in energy transport and storage, including how gas turbines maximize energy density. They dive into various forms of energy storage—including batteries, hydrogen, and mechanical and thermal energy—for various energy sources such as wind, solar, fossil fuels, etc., and more.

During the energy transport and conversion processes, for example in the case of hydrogen, there are significant energy losses. The lowest losses are with coal, then oil and fossil fuels. As a result of these losses, “Hydrogen is a viable solution for storage, but it’s not a great solution to power a large-scale electric power plant by itself,” Kurz said.

Really, energy comes down to sustainability, affordability, and sustainability of supply – and in this equation, renewables are typically intermittent and not a reliable full-time source of energy.

So where does turbomachinery fit into all of this?

“From a turbomachinery perspective, if you exclude electric—because as Rainer said, it's not always applicable, as you can’t transport energy from Venezuela to Florida along an electric line—then you have to convert your energy stored material, be it natural gas, oil, coal, or from an alternative source then you have to convert it into hydrogen or ammonia or something else, and then transport it,” Brun explained. “All these convergent processes utilize turbomachinery. We have maybe 100 years of experience transporting oil in pipelines and ships and trucks and that involves a lot of pumping—we're very good at pumping – it’s very efficient. We also have about a similar amount of time compressing natural gas, which over the last 40 - 50 years we've used a lot more centrifugal compressors for transporting natural gas. Now we're running into the challenge of sustainable alternative energies where basically you're saying, ‘OK, I'm going to take my wind and solar electric and convert them to let's say hydrogen or ammonia or dimethyl ether or methanol—there are a lot of fluids that you can make from electricity that are energy carriers—but then they have to be transported. Hydrogen is the lightest gas (We had a previous podcast where we talked about the challenges of hydrogen transport). Similarly, ammonia is a liquid that has to be transported at slightly refrigerated temperatures, and it brings its own challenges because it's highly poisonous and very corrosive to a lot of materials. Dimethyl ether is not that hard to transport—it’s similar to diesel—but it's very expensive to make. Methanol is also highly poisonous. So there are a lot of other challenges that you now face with these energy carriers that you worry about when transporting your original form of energy to the end user.”