Moving Gas Turbine Package from Conventional Gas to Hydrogen Blend

The current greatest challenge, that all gas turbine manufactures and users have in front of them for the years to come, is the energy transition while reducing CO2 footprint and to contrast climate change. To this aim the introduction of hydrogen as fuel gas (or its blend) is playing a very important role. The benefit from an environmental point of view is undisputed, but the presence of hydrogen introduces a series of safety related aspects to be considered for the design of all systems of a gas turbine package. Most of the design standards developed and adopted in the past are based on conventional natural gas, however physical properties of hydrogen require to analyze additional aspects or revise the current ones. In this context, the design for safety is paramount as it is strongly impacted by the low energy ignition of hydrogen blend fuels. Baker Hughes has built its experience on several sites, different Customers and applications currently installed. These gas turbines run with a variety of hydrogen blends, with concentration as high as 100% hydrogen. Baker Hughes has achieved several milestones moving from design to experimental set up leveraging the internal infrastructures consolidating design assumptions. In this work the critical aspects such as material selection, instrumentation, electrical devices and components are discussed in the framework of package safety with the aim to evolve conventional design minimizing the impacts on package configurations.