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Hydrogen

The POWER

May 30, 2019 Interview: GE

by Sonal Patel

Unleashing a

Hydrogen Gas
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technology could run on hydrogen fuels,
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GE Power—and GE’s topmost hydrogen
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Dr. Jeffrey Goldmeer is the

director of Gas Turbine
Combustion & Fuels
Solutions for GE Power.
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 POWER: How did you become involved in
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hydrogen? 

Goldmeer: I’ve been in my current role as

the fuel-flex leader for the gas turbine
business for 12 years. I came to GE
Power out of GE Global Research Center,
where I worked in combustion for six
years, and for the last three years at the
R&D center, I actually managed the
combustion team there. My background is
in combustion and fuels, my PhD is in
combustion. So I’ve been doing
combustion and/or fuels in one way or
another for my entire career.

As part of my job, I watch for trends in the

industry and attend different industry
seminars, events, engage with customers.
So I try and understand what our
customers are asking for, what are the
global trends. And about two years ago or
so, I started getting an inkling that … our
customers are starting to scratch their
heads a little bit more about hydrogen.
And it really became very evident last
year that that was becoming a big deal. I
was in Europe for a conference called
Electrify Europe … and I talked about
hydrogen there, and a lot of customers
were interested in a white paper we’d
written, and which we’ve since updated.
And that really was an absolute trigger
moment. I think it’s only built more and
more. I’m not sure I can read the industry
trades on any given day without some
story of hydrogen, in some manner,
shape, or form.

POWER: Why, in your view, has there

been this emphatic attention to hydrogen
of late? What is its potential in the future
power system?

Goldmeer: It’s a really good question and

I’ve been thinking a lot about it. Part of it
has to do with just the nature of our
industry. We are a long-cycle industry. It
takes a long time for things to happen,
and as our customers are thinking about
what happens to their existing assets—
which may be a few years old, maybe
older than that—as customers are
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 thinking about the purchase that they
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know they’re in the process of making 
today or might be making in the future,
and to look at trends around them, I think
they’re questioning what happens to these
assets, which we know have lifespans
that are measured in decades. And I think
they’re trying to understand ‘What does
that mean?’ If the world pivots to
decarbonize fuels—hydrogen being one
of them—what does that mean for those
assets? Do those assets effectively stop
being valuable or valued because they
can’t be used in the ecosystem? And
they’re looking first of all to us as [original
equipment manufacturers (OEMs)] to say,
‘Hey GE, can that gas turbine that I
bought from you a year ago, or 10 years
ago, or I might buy from you in two years,
if the world evolves to require decarbonize
energy, and hydrogen is the carrier, is that
something we can still do?’

POWER: Generating hydrogen isn’t really

a new concept. What’s changed on that
front, and will there be enough of a supply
to run a future fleet powered with
hydrogen?

Goldmeer: Yes, hydrogen and the

concept of making hydrogen is not new.
Jules Verne was very prophetic. A
hundred and some odd years ago, in one
of his books, he talked about how
hydrogen might become … a next
generation source of energy replacing
coal. I think we can look at this kind of in
two ways. There’s what we’ll call industrial
usage, and then we’ll call utility-scale
application. In the industrial world, the use
of hydrogen for power in some ways has
been happening all around us for
decades. In those cases, you’ve got what
would be a steel mill, a refinery, but you
basically get a process gas that’s got
some amount of hydrogen in it, and
instead of flaring the gas, they’re putting it
into a gas turbine to burn it. There are
many examples of turbines that have
been doing that for decades.

I think the question that we’re looking at

today that’s very different is can we
generate hydrogen for the sole purpose of
generating hydrogen to use for power?
Now, we can think of hydrogen as
basically chemical energy storage. Why
are we making hydrogen? Maybe we’re
making it because there’s excess
renewable power. Maybe because we
want to displace a carbon-containing fuel.
Whatever the reason, we’re now talking
about generating utility-scale levels of
hydrogen. And that’s where I think the
world is trying to understand what’s
happening here, and again, we’re viewing
this from the lens of our customers, who
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 are asking us, ‘GE, if the world starts to
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do things, whether it’s a high carbon tax, 
whether it’s [carbon dioxide] emissions
are going to be more strictly regulated,
what happens with the turbine?’ And my
focus really has been helping customers
answer that fundamental question. If that
pivot occurs toward a hydrogen-based
economy or toward a decarbonized fuel
requirement, can we support our
customers, whether it be new customers
or existing customers, in that transition?

I think it’s absolutely worth watching.

Again, when you talk to folks around the
world, when you read the reports coming
out of Europe, out of Australia, New
Zealand, and they are heavily focused on
creating a hydrogen economy and
creating a lot of hydrogen. In many cases,
the concept is the so-called ‘green
hydrogen’—hydrogen via electrolysis,
driven by renewable power. I think the
studies that you could look at today,
whether it be from the International
Energy Agency in its ‘World Energy
Outlook’ or others, would tell you that that
as a snapshot of today, hydrogen would
cost more than natural gas. But I think
what we need to think about is we’re not
looking at today, we’re looking at the
future. What happens in 10, 20, 30, 40
years? What happens to the technology in
terms of maturation, in terms of reduction
of cost? We don’t know what the future
will bring, but we want to make sure that
we are prepared to support our
customers, and again, that’s part of that
process we’re going through now. No one
really knows what that future’s going to
look like. There are many paths to get to a
potentially decarbonized future, and
fundamentally, we want to support our
customers, partner with them, as we walk
through this together.

POWER: What is GE doing in the

hydrogen realm amid all this uncertainty?

Goldmeer: A lot of this comes from our

experience with the industrial cases. We
have [several GE gas turbine modes,
including] 6Bs, 7Es, 6Fs, 7Fs that are
working in this space with fuels that have
hydrogen today, whether it’s an
[integrated gasification combined cycle
(IGCC)] plant or a refinery. We actually
have a 6B that’s running in Asia on a fuel
that somewhere between 70% and 95%
hydrogen—it varies. We’ve installed over
70 to 75 gas turbines burning low-Btu
fuels that contain hydrogen, and those
turbines combined have over 4 to 4.5
million operating hours. There are other
fuel categories that mimic, from a heating
value perspective, hydrogen and natural
gas blends, and if I throw those©turbines in
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 then we have something like 6 million
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operating hours. And so part of our
 
experience comes from actually having
been doing this for decades.

Our first gas turbine working in an IGCC

project, if I recall correctly, it was the late
1980s. So, we’ve been doing this for 30
years. Part of this is continuing to take
lessons from the industrial sector for
these fuels and applying them to this
large-scale utility side. So we continue to
learn about what it means to be working
with fuels that have hydrogen. And a lot of
these lessons are things around the plant.
How do you modify a natural gas plant to
run with fuels that have hydrogen?

We have to think about [balance of plant],

safety systems, accessories, all these
things. It’s not just the gas turbine. We
have to think about the entire gas turbine
combined cycle—the whole plant,
anything that the fuel touches, any
auxiliary systems that could potentially be
impacted. But that’s also combustion
technology. And so we’ve been doing
development of combustion technology
for, for fuel flexibility as a whole, again, for
decades. It’s not just hydrogen. We focus
on a whole realm of fuel flexibility, whether
it be heavy liquids and crude oils for the
Middle East, whether it’s naphtha and
condensates—the whole gamut.

But when it comes to hydrogen,

specifically, we can roll the clock back
about 15 years, 16 years or so. Going
back to that time period, the U.S.
Department of Energy was thinking that
coal was going to become a dominant
supplier of fuel for the U.S. It was, at the
time, but it would become more so with
gas prices going up. And so they created
what was known as the High Hydrogen
Turbine Program. GE applied for and
received funding for that program to
develop gas turbine technology,
specifically combustion technology, to
increase the efficiency of the gas turbine
when operating on a high-hydrogen fuel.
The thought process behind that was that
if IGCC was going to become the
dominant provider of power in the future,
displacing gas plants, that carbon capture
might be something that we need to deal
with. But obviously adding up post-
combustion carbon capture system onto a
power plant decreases the efficiency of
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 the plant. So the DOE was trying to
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understand how could you increase the 
efficiency of the plant, and therefore a
huge driver would be the efficiency of the
gas turbine. So that’s how it evolved. In
retrospect, it’s really funny to see how 15
years ago we thought coal would be the
dominant fossil fuel, and here we are
today where coal is in a very different
place than it was 15 years ago.

So the team was looking at architectures

that dealt with those characteristics of
hydrogen. We took that from the
combustion lab at the R&D center—I
actually was the manager at the time we
were doing single-nozzle testing—took
that to our facility in Greenville, South
Carolina, where we eventually tested a full
combustion chamber. The combustion
technology had a lot of advantages. It did
a much better job of premixing. You can
get more nitrogen oxides (NOx) if you’re
not well-mixed everywhere. So small
hotspots can give you local NOx
increases. This combustion technology
did a much better job because it was
doing a better job of mixing. Because of
that, the engineering team realized it had
lots of advantages, not just for high
hydrogen applications, but for operating
with natural gas as we move to higher and
higher firing temperatures. So that
technology, which we think of as kind of a
multi-jet injection, ended up becoming
part of the combustion system that we call
today our DLN 2.6e. And that’s the
combustion system that we’re currently
shipping on our 9HA.02 gas turbines.

So we went from, thinking about that

timeline, from development of a
combustion technology that was focused
on high hydrogen that provided real
tangible benefits to operating on other
fuels like natural gas. And then we took
that technology on to our latest HA gas
turbines. But now we can go the other
direction. Now as customers are saying to
us, ‘Hey, we’re interested in utility-scale
power generation, we’re thinking about
HA class turbines, but we are worried
about what happens in a potential future
where we have to run with hydrogen.’ And
the great thing is because that
combustion system had its genesis in this
DOE high-hydrogen program, it carries
some of that capability with it. In the
laboratory, we’ve already demonstrated
that combustion system [can] run up to
50% hydrogen blended with natural gas.

POWER:What does GE see as the most

challenging technical aspects of
combusting hydrogen versus natural gas.
What are technical challenges it faces as
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 it develops an efficient gas turbine that
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can be wholly or mostly hydrogen-fueled? 

Goldmeer: Let’s start fundamentally with

the differences between hydrogen and
natural gas. Physically, hydrogen is a
smaller molecule, so we have to worry
about hydrogen leaks where normal
fittings and seals at certain levels, where
we wouldn’t leak with natural gas.
Hydrogen is much more flammable than
natural gas or methane. Methane’s lower
flammability limit is about 7% by volume
and goes up to 20%. Hydrogen starts at
about 4% on the lower flammability [scale]
and goes up to about 75%. So, hydrogen
is much more flammable. If you have a
leak of hydrogen, it becomes more
dangerous. Hydrogen flames are harder
to see with the naked eye than a flame
with a traditional hydrocarbon. And so
immediately, when we begin to think
about the implications of running
hydrogen on a gas turbine, before we
even talk about combustion challenges,
we need to think about fundamental
safety issues. That’s where things like
ventilation, having the right hazardous gas
detection systems, etc., become a critical
part of any conversation we have with
customers. The next piece of it is
hydrogen’s lower heating value is about
274.7 Btu/standard cubic foot (scf), and
natural gas depending on, you know,
whether it’s liquefied natural gas or shale
gas, is somewhere between 900 and
1,000 Btu/scf. So hydrogen carries about
one-third of the heating value on a
volumetric basis, which means in order to
give the gas turbine the same kind of
energy input, you got to flow more
hydrogen—which again impacts your
configuration of your accessory system
and such. You’ve got to think that through.

You can’t use a standard fuel nozzle

because you can’t pass all that hydrogen
through it three times the flow. So you
have to modify fuel nozzles in order to be
able to flow that much. From a
combustive perspective, hydrogen is
incredibly reactive. One metric around
reactivity of a fuel is the flame speed. You
know, how fast that flame wants to
propagate into the unburned fuel. And
that’s always something that from a
combustion design perspective you’re
aware of so that you can maintain a
margin to flame-holding and flashback
issues. Hydrogen has got a flame speed
that, depending on the study you look at,
is about an order of magnitude faster than
methane. So that hydrogen flame will
want to propagate upstream into the
unburned fuel much faster. So you have
to have a combustion system that is
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 explicitly configured to deal with that
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issue. That’s why, to burn 60, 70, 80, to 
100% hydrogen in a combustion system is
a real challenge. How do you deal with
the fact that the flame wants to go
someplace that, as a design engineer, you
don’t want the flame to be?

But that being said, when you can master

all of those challenges, hydrogen is a
clean-burning fuel—it doesn’t carry any
carbon with it—so that’s a positive. The
flip-side is hydrogen burns hotter than
methane or other hydrocarbons, and
since NOx is a function of flame
temperature, while you can get lower
CO2 emissions, you actually get higher
NOx emissions. And so the other thing
you have to think about is—whether it’s
an existing gas turbine or a gas turbine
you’ll put in today and at some point you
want to convert over to running some
amount of hydrogen—what’s the
implication for emissions?

And so imagine you’ve got an a

NOx minimum you have to meet, and you
know that when you go to having
hydrogen, you’ll need a larger [selective
catalytic reduction (SCR)] catalyst bed. A
simple thing to do today would just be to
make that space in the heat recovery
steam generator (HRSG) a little bigger so
it’s easier to add the catalyst as you need
it versus 30 years from now, when you’ve
got to figure out how to go put extra
catalyst. [Think about] how do you handle
that with an existing HRSG structure. So
there are some simple things you can do
today. But hydrogen in of itself, is doable.
It’s just that we think have to think through
all the interrelated systems and aspects to
it.

POWER: How soon could we see a GE

H-class gas turbine burning high-volume
hydrogen?

Goldmeer: As I said earlier, for the DLN

2.6e combustion system, we have
continued to do work with that system in
the lab and evaluate its hydrogen
capability. The number that we talk about
publicly is it’s got capability to 50% [of
hydrogen]. For where we are today, where
we’re not seeing hydrogen-scale power
plants, that’s a number that fits very
comfortably in places like Europe or other
places. What they’re talking about is not
going from zero hydrogen to 100%
hydrogen, but the discussion in many
places is with incremental shifts. So
maybe it’s 5% or 10% or 20%. And so in
that scenario, where we’re going to walk
our way up to 100% hydrogen—if that’s
the path we’ll take—having a gas turbine
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 could run 50% hydrogen gives you some
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real margin. The other thing to think about 
is just the investment it’s going to take to
make that much hydrogen. If a country
were to decide they’re going to go down
that path, it will take time to develop the
infrastructure, update the piping, the
transmission systems for gas, etc.

I think one thing I want to make sure to

make people think about as we consider
our future energy systems—as we think
about the possibilities of being sort of
carbon-free or net-carbon—is that gas
turbines could be complementary to that.
It’s not a gas turbine or renewable power
scenario. Gas turbines can fill a niche and
be part of that kind of future energy
ecosystem, and I think sometimes people
lose sight of that. Because of the inherent
fuel flexibility of a gas turbine, it can
absolutely be part of that kind of future
energy system.

—Sonal Patel is a POWER associate

editor (@sonalcpatel,
@POWERmagazine)

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