Gas Storage in PVC Pipe

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6" Pipe

Have you considered PVC pipe for gas storage? 6" costs $45 for a 20' section, caps are $15 (verify). Pipe + 2 caps is $75.

Each 20' section holds about 4 cubic feet of gas. So $750 gets us 40 cubic feet, or about 300 gallons equivalent. So comparable to new propane gas tanks.

At 10 atmospheres, that is equivalent to 3000 gallons of gas at one atmosphere. About 600 moles of gas, if primarily methane then it is about 10 kg of methane, or about 2 gallons of gasoline equivalent.

What do you think?

Comparison to 1" Pipe for Hydrogen

Medium pressure production of hydrogen occurs at 33ATM, without need for pumping.

  • If 6" pipe is $75 for 4 cubic feet - what is the price comparison for 1" pipe?
  • It is .785 cu in per inch of pipe, or 188 cu in per stick. of 1728 cu in per cu ft - 1/10 cu ft per pipe. 40 cubic feet would be 400 pipes.
  • At $5 per stick and $0.59 per cap, this is $2.5k for this storage.
  • What about hydrogen? For 600 moles, that is 1.2 kg of hydrogen. With the specific energy density of gasoline 1/3 that of hydrogen - that is about 4 kg of gasoline, or 1.4 gallons of gasoline, or 15 kWhr. That is more than enough for storage over night.
  • Note: Honda EU1000 burns 1 quart per hour to generate 1kW. Using such an efficient generator for electricity, we get about 5kWhr from the stored hydrogen.
  • This makes for approximately $500/kWhr storage cost

This implies that if we could split water, we could store it effectively from a very small area of solar collection - if PV is 10% efficient, and biomass production is .1%, there is about a 100x efficiency increase in using PV for fuel storage compared to biomass.

Comparison to Batteries

The methane or hydrogen storage route are both comparable in cost for pressurized storage. Hydrogen is more energy efficient in terms of solar capture ares, by about 100x. Advantage of hydrogen is not needing a pressure pump. If the pressure vessel cost is $2.5k, that is a worthwhile investment for going off grid.

Note that PVC pipe lifetime is 100+ years. This qualifies for OSE's metric of lifetime design. This is also about 20 times cheaper than lead acid batteries, based on a 10 yr life of deep cycle batteries.

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