Northwest Natural Holding Company (NYSE:NWN) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Kimberly Heiting: Sure Hi. You know, I think that there is a lot of work that’s been done and being done on embrittlement. And it really – there is a lot of factors that you have to sort of assess, it’s the type of the system that’s flowing hydrogen for example, on our system, we have a low-pressure system, about 50% of our system is poly. We have no cast iron or bare steels, we have that steel-coated pipe. So when we’re looking at the research that’s been done on embrittlement, it’s important to know that the research we’ve been seeing is, it’s potential when you’re flowing hydrogen to go from maybe a 100-year pipe life down to 80-year pipe life. So it’s not an issue of any kind of short-term embrittlement that people are concerned with.

It’s really what is that pipe life length. And again, if potentially you’re going from 100 to 80 your pipe length, we don’t see that as an issue. I don’t know that Singapore system particularly, we could certainly find those characteristics for you. But I think the point is that hydrogen blending has been happening around the world in different systems at different volumes. We know there is several blending projects. One is the U.K., they’ve been blending 700 home development with 20% hydrogen. There is a Germany project that’s just started with a 30% blend. There is another U.K. project where they’re going to take a low-pressure system like ours and just begin blending a 100% to test those issues around pipe and fittings and make sure that they’re learning, sort of, what is that higher-end blend, and how quickly could we potentially retrofit if we needed to certain parts of a low-pressure system to get to those larger blend levels.

Chris Ellinghaus: Okay, thanks. And could you give us a little more detail about the two RNG projects with the conditioning issues. Can you give us some sense of what that’s all about?

Justin Palfreyman: Yes, Hi, this is Justin. Happy to talk a little more about that. So, as David mentioned in his prepared remarks, construction is complete at the two facilities. What the EDL team and their contractors are working on right now is really a component of the conditioning equipment is the CO2 removal process and the technology related to that. Trying to get that to a point where it can support the specified volumes for the facilities. And right now, they’re having a little bit of a challenge getting that up to the full volumetric levels. And so they’re working through some of the technical aspects there to determine exactly what the fix should be. But we expect that, that will be resolved in the coming weeks.

David Anderson: I think the key for us is that the field is – yes, the field is producing the gross amount of gas, it’s just the amount that they can actually put on the system is not where it needs to be right now.

Chris Ellinghaus: Got you. All right, thank you.

Operator: This will conclude today’s Q&A session. So I’ll hand the call back to David Anderson for some concluding remarks.

David Anderson: Adam, thank you very much. Appreciate everybody joining us on this Friday. If you have any follow-up questions, I think you know, Nikki, very well, also for media, if you would like to talk to David Roy, he’d be happy to talk with you. Everybody have a great weekend. Thank you.

Operator: This concludes today’s call. Thank you very much for your attendance. You may now disconnect your line.

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