Hydrogen – Employment, Energy and Environment

Hiding behind hydrogen

This article by John Szabo and Gareth Dale was first published in shortened form in the Conversation and then on 13th January by the Ecologist. We are grateful to the authors and the Ecologist for their permission to publish it here.

The hydrogen economy appears to enjoying its great leap forward. Assuming its construction goes to plan, a €2.5bn undersea pipeline will from 2030 convey “green hydrogen” from Spain to France. It is one element in a hydrogen infrastructure package that the European Commission announced earlier this year.

In the USA, some power stations are being upgraded to allow hydrogen to be blended with fossil gas, and the Norwegian oil company Equinor is teaming up with Thermal SSE to build a 1,800MW “blue hydrogen” power plant in Britain. China, earlier this year, unveiled a long-term hydrogen plan which includes major technological and infrastructure investments.

If the number of projects is growing at pace, one may suppose, a large supply of the resource must exist somewhere. Well, it does and it doesn’t.

Decarbonise

Hydrogen is produced in multiple ways. A colour spectrum is used to render it simple. “Grey” and “brown/black” refer to hydrogen produced from fossil gas (methane) and coal (brown or black coal) respectively—a process that, for every ton of hydrogen, emits between ten and twelve tons of carbon dioxide for grey hydrogen or eighteen to twenty for brown.

“Blue” is the same process but filed under “low carbon” because the carbon dioxide is supposed to be captured and stored underground. “Green” hydrogen is conventionally defined as generated from renewable electricity passed through water to split it into hydrogen and oxygen.

When you zoom in on hydrogen’s “colours,” however, they appear slippery. The hydrogen economy is not a palette of technological options but a grey-brown oil refinery behind an eye-catching blue-green front gate. All the chatter is of the latter.

Green and blue hydrogen yield 11 million and 320,000 Google hits respectively, as against 95,000 for grey and 49,000 for brown. The reality curves in the opposite direction: only 0.04 per cent of hydrogen is green, and blue hydrogen is also less than one per cent. At least 96 per cent is grey or brown, most of which is used in oil refineries and for manufacturing ammonia and methanol.

It’s an enormous industry, responsible for emitting more carbon dioxide than all of Britain’s and France’s emissions combined. The test of any government or corporate hydrogen agenda, then, is the nature—or even the existence—of its plans to decarbonise the 96 per cent. In some cases this is beginning to happen. But if the focus is on producing more ‘blue’ and more ‘green’ for other purposes, something is amiss.

Failures

When you look closely at green hydrogen, some of it resolves into shades of grey. It’s not simply that its production is extremely energy-intensive or that in its double transformation—from electricity to hydrogen and thence to its final usage—so much energy is wasted.

It is partly that, if combusted, it emits nitrogen oxides, and also that, if scaled up to play a significant economic role by 2050 (as in recent projections by the International Energy Agency), its freshwater requirements will exceed one quarter of today’s global annual consumption, causing water stress in some regions.

Above all, green hydrogen is meaningfully green only if the renewable energy that generates it cannot be fed into the grid to replace power from gas or coal plants.

A similar but much more harmful trick of the light occurs with blue hydrogen. Look closely and you see that in reality it’s either chequered blue/grey or even blank, a mere fiction.

For hydrogen to be true blue, the emissions must be captured and securely stored. In theory, CCS is workable but nearly all plants use the captured carbon to pump more oil and many have been shut down as failures.

Costs

Only a handful operate to store carbon rather than using it to produce oil, and even here it is highly energy intensive and captures only a part of the carbon dioxide. It can also leak once in storage.

Moreover, blue hydrogen’s main feedstock is methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that is notorious for leaking: at the drilling wells and from the pipelines. Recent research suggests that blue hydrogen is even worse for the climate than fossil gas.

Blue hydrogen is still in its infancy and we don’t yet know whether most of the CCS costs will be loaded onto taxpayers, as the gas companies demand.

Price projections should be treated with the utmost scepticism. One boosterish paper cites blue hydrogen from Alberta (Canada) at $1.50 to $2.0 per kg. It adds that blue hydrogen production will help Canada achieve its decarbonisation goals.

In fact, research at Shell’s CCS plant in Alberta discovered that it emits more carbon than it captures. For the foreseeable future, this is not a “low carbon” product in any sense of the term. It is a hypothetical solution the costs of which remain unknown, as the development of projects has been slow and costly with few realised, while future operating costs are also unclear.

Electrolysers

Given the question marks that surround blue hydrogen, it’s widely hoped that a silver lining of today’s high gas prices will be that green hydrogen becomes cost competitive.

In terms of inputs, the green-blue price difference boils down to the cost of electricity versus fossil gas. With the global energy crisis exacerbated by Russia’s war on Ukraine, many are asking: will high gas prices favour green hydrogen? Spoiler alert: probably not.

In the EU, as in many economies, electricity pricing is based on the principle of marginal costs, and that usually means the price of power from fossil gas plants. When it is high, renewable electricity generators will seek to sell to the grid. In this way, blue and green prices are largely interwoven in the current market setup; their inputs move in sync.

Of course, there are geographical and temporal differences. During sunny spells, electricity prices may collapse as solar PV-based generation picks up.

This unlinks electricity and natural gas prices, but only momentarily, often only for a few hours—not enough to justify investment in electrolysers to produce green hydrogen. On the whole, the price gap between blue and green will remain fairly narrow until electricity markets are fundamentally restructured.

Transition

There’s worse. The high price of hydrocarbons has turbocharged the industry’s expansion. The US government is exhorting oil and fracking firms to ‘drill baby drill.’ Britain’s government has issued over one hundred additional licenses to drill. Colossal new fossil fuel investments have been announced across the Middle East and Africa.

All this will have long-term ramifications. First, in a few years when the new production comes on stream, and particularly if the current growth slowdown substantially depresses demand, gas and oil will again become cheaper—until the next price spike prompts new rounds of investment, and the infernal cycle continues.

Second, the owners of the new-drilled wells and other infrastructure will fight tooth and nail to defend those assets, and to stall the decarbonisation agenda. The peculiarity of hydrogen is that it is a means to both the stalling and the decarbonisation.

The latter can be simply stated. Green hydrogen will be important to the decarbonisation of certain sectors such as steel, and ammonia for fertilisers, and possibly shipping and trucking.

The role of hydrogen in stalling the transition is complex but no less important. It begins with the recognition that the fossil fuel corporations are rebranding themselves as agents of “carbon management.”

Ramping

The goals are to prevent their assets from getting stranded by repurposing them, above all by marketing grey and blue hydrogen as “bridge” fuels; to lock in hydrocarbon production for decades to come; and to defray the costs onto taxpayers.

For this, hydrogen offers the perfect vehicle, in view of its confusion of shades and colours. Fossil fuel interests use it to counter opposition to new investments in fossil gas through an aggressive marketing and lobbying campaign that presents a largely fictional substance, blue hydrogen, as a low-carbon “bridge” to an unspecified future genuinely-green transition.

Other sectors have joined the oil-led coalition. As the engineer Tom Baxter observes, it is seen by gas network operators and boiler manufacturers as their survival route.

Likewise, power utility companies are keen, as hydrogen’s inefficiencies mean they’ll sell more power. Relatively conservative trade unions, such as Britain’s GMB (General, Municipal, Boilermakers), are onboard too.

To tackle this stalling operation, a strong role for public policy is indispensable. Governments will need to regulate or tax carbon out of the market while simultaneously ramping up renewables.

Malign

Fiscal and subsidy schemes need to pivot from supporting fossil fuels to supporting renewables. The approach to electricity pricing must shift, to decouple the prices of electricity and fossil gas.

Instead of the marginal pricing system, it requires incentivising rewards for generators according to their average costs plus a slight surplus, either through a robustly regulated market system or by nationalising the energy companies and setting prices and production.

Such interventions would give green hydrogen a competitive advantage, one that can be furthered by other subsidies, such as tax credits on the model of the US Inflation Reduction Act. Above all, energy demand needs to be scaled down. The lower the demand, the less the upward pressure on price.

In any future energy system, hydrogen will have a role. But its expansion needs to be carefully designed, to prevent the promise of green hydrogen being mis-used, in opening the back door to its ecologically malign blue and grey cousins.

These Authors

John Szabo is a Fellow at the Institute of World Economics, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies as well as an Assistant Lecturer at the Department of Eötvös Loránd University International Relations and European Studies, Eötvös Loránd University. His research focuses on the energy-society nexus, especially in the context of the energy transition.

Gareth Dale teaches politics at Brunel University, and many of his articles appear on its website. He tweets at @Gareth_Dale.

If you’d like to read more you can look at the ScotE3 briefing – ‘The Use and Abuse of Hydrogen’ – the briefing can also be downloaded as a PDF for hard copy distribution.

Photo report from the St Fitticks Protest

Around 80 people, with a strong contingent from Aberdeen, rallied at the Scottish Parliament yesterday to demand that the Scottish Government stops developments in Torry, Aberdeen that would see the end of St Fitticks park, a hugely important green space in a heavily built up area. The message from the protestors was that there’s no justice if ‘transition’ is driven by the Oil Industry seeking new sources of profit at the expense of working people and the environment.

The protestors called for supporters to text, tweet and use every available means to tell Minister Tom Arthur and your local MSP to order the removal of the rezoning of St Fittick’s Park from Aberdeen’s new Local Development Plan.

HERE IS A TEMPLATE: https://t.co/RE66ykd6Ly for emailing

Updated briefing on the use and abuse of hydrogen

Here’s an updated version of Briefing 13 on the use and abuse of hydrogen. You can download the briefing as a PDF.

Abuse

Check through the news bulletins and the financial papers and you’ll find hydrogen in the news. Big energy companies, the Westminster and Holyrood governments and some trade unions are all heralding hydrogen as a ‘green’ alternative to the natural gas which most of us use for heating and cooking. For example, SGN who run Scotland’s gas network are promoting a plan in which hydrogen would be produced and stored at the St Fergus gas terminal, north of Peterhead. It envisages starting to use hydrogen in Aberdeen and then extending the hydrogen network to the rest of the northeast coast and the central belt by 2045.

Natural gas used for heating and cooking accounts for around 30% of the UK’s carbon emissions. In contrast burning hydrogen for heat results in zero emissions. But while Westminster and Holyrood continue to advocate investment in hydrogen a string of expert reports have been published warning that going down this road will be disastrous. So, what should we believe and what should we campaign for?

Grey, blue and green?

You will hear talk about grey, blue, and green hydrogen. The colours refer to how the hydrogen is produced – and it’s the production method that determines the impact of hydrogen on the environment.

Grey hydrogen is made from natural gas. Almost all the hydrogen that’s in use now is produced in this way. World-wide production currently amounts to 70 million tonnes. Greenhouse gases are a by-product of the production process, and current production has a similar impact on global warming to the whole aviation industry.

Much of the current hype is over blue hydrogen. Blue hydrogen is produced from natural gas in the same way as grey – the difference is that the production process incorporates carbon capture and storage. Greenhouse gases are stored rather than released to the atmosphere. Using blue hydrogen for all our domestic heating and cooking would require carbon capture on a massive scale. Large-scale carbon capture is untested, the technology for capture is not yet available and there are serious concerns about the long-term safety of large-scale storage. The production process for blue hydrogen is energy intensive and needs large amounts of green electricity. One example – Northern Gas Networks have a plan to convert domestic gas supplies to hydrogen. The aim is to have converted 15.7 million homes by 2050. This would require 8 million tonnes of hydrogen and need the equivalent of 60 production plants of the size of the largest currently operational, plus a huge deployment of unproven carbon capture and storage technology.

Green hydrogen is produced by electrolysing water – if that electricity is from a renewable source the process is zero carbon. However, the process requires even more green electricity than producing blue hydrogen. The NGN scheme to supply 15.7 million homes would require around seven times as much wind generated electricity as is currently produced in the UK.

Generating electricity to provide the energy to ‘reform’ natural gas or electrolyse water into hydrogen and then using the hydrogen for heat is inherently inefficient. Direct use of electricity is cheaper, more efficient and would require much less generating capacity.

So why the hydrogen hype?

A new hydrogen economy (dependent on carbon capture and storage technology) is at the heart of the North Sea Transition Deal, dreamed up by the industry body Oil and Gas UK, published by the UK government in March 2021 and endorsed by Holyrood. The transition deal aims at continuing extraction of oil and gas through to 2050 and beyond. To be sure of cutting emissions with the speed that is required we need to phase out oil and gas now and invest in proven technologies that are based on renewable energy sources.

Ed Matthew Associate Director at independent climate and energy think tank E3G says hydrogen is the wrong choice for heating homes. Blue hydrogen (manufactured from natural gas) needs CCS so would be massively expensive and keeps us hooked on gas. Green hydrogen (made by electrolysis using renewable electricity) is 4 times less efficient than using heat pumps. “Hydrogen is being pushed by the gas industry. Beware.” Dave Toke, reader in energy politics at Aberdeen University agrees. He calls it: “the start of one of the greatest pieces of greenwash that have been committed in the UK.”

Use

It’s currently hard to see how even green hydrogen can have more than a very specialised place in a fully decarbonised economy. Hydrogen fuel cells are currently being used for buses, and mass transport is of great importance in decarbonisation. But it seems likely that electric buses will make more sense than using large amounts of renewable energy to produce green hydrogen.

Heat pump – Lerwick, Shetland. Image by Pete Cannell CC0

The priority uses for renewable energy are to replace gas and coal in power stations and to heat homes and other buildings with electrically driven heat pumps. It’s possible however that hydrogen will have a roll in transporting heavy loads and in sea transport.”

Campaign

The main message of this briefing is that the hydrogen + CCS strategy is designed to maintain the profits of the big energy companies and will not achieve the cuts in carbon emissions that are needed. It puts profit before people and planet. There are alternatives that will work.

To decarbonise heat, we need retrofitted insulation, heat pumps and district heating schemes on a mass scale that can only be achieved by the public sector.

Firms producing filthy-dirty “grey” hydrogen must be required to take action to reduce the horrendous levels of greenhouse gas emissions they produce.

Hydrogen use must be limited to applications that are socially useful and don’t add to the climate crisis.

[This briefing was updated on 9^th January 2023]

Download this briefing as a PDF

Why workers and climate activists should reject the ‘British energy security strategy’

Yesterday (6^th April) the UK Government announced a new ‘British Energy Security Strategy’. The shape of the strategy isn’t a surprise with many of the elements being trailed in recent weeks. Put simply the strategy is a disaster. It’s a recipe for failing to meet UK greenhouse gas emission targets and ignores the recommendations of the IPCC report that was published earlier in the week (4^th April).

This post is a first response, and we will share more detailed analysis in the weeks to come.

The government’s press release notes that the strategy involves an ‘ambitious, quicker expansion of nuclear, wind, solar, hydrogen, oil and gas, including delivering the equivalent to one nuclear reactor a year instead of one a decade.’

Note the ‘expansion of oil and gas’. The aim will be to accelerate the approval of new oil and gas fields in the North Sea and west of Shetland. Essentially, it’s a doubling down on the oil industries so called ‘North Sea Transition Deal’. The aim of the deal is to make the North Sea a ‘net-zero’ oil and gas basin by 2050 – but this can only happen if carbon capture and storage can be developed and introduced at large scale, which is as yet uncertain.

Hydrogen is part of the oil industry strategy – the aim of the transition deal is for hydrogen to replace North Sea gas in domestic and commercial heating systems – these currently account for more than 20% of UK greenhouse gas emissions. The strategy talks about hydrogen supplying around 10% of energy needs. What it doesn’t say is that producing hydrogen by splitting methane or water is an enormously inefficient process and so a very significant proportion of all the new electricity produced from nuclear, wind, solar and oil and gas will be needed to produce the hydrogen!

After a period of equivocating on nuclear power it’s now back at the centre of the strategy. No figures are given, but if we extrapolate from the cost of the current Hinkley C project the proposed developments will cost around £150 billion. The government refers to nuclear as clean and safe. It is neither. This blog has looked at the arguments about nuclear elsewhere. It’s a hugely expensive form of energy, high risk with long construction times and a history of cost overruns and serious and unresolved problems with radioactive waste.

The new strategy says nothing about reducing energy demand through insulating new buildings and retrofitting existing housing stock. Retrofitting the majority of UK housing is estimated to cost around £160 billion – this is roughly what the new nuclear programme will cost. So, it seems like their plan is to construct large scale nuclear plants whose output will then provide the energy that is lost through the walls and roofs of homes, office and factories.

The supposed rationale for the new strategy is energy security. Currently working people are paying the price for the super profits being earned by the oil and gas sector. Led by that sector the strategy opts for a future of high energy prices – continuing oil and gas and new nuclear. Renewable costs continue to decrease, nuclear energy costs continue to rise. Currently renewable electricity is 6 times cheaper than gas and the gap is even bigger between the cost of renewables and the cost of nuclear.

Wind turbines near Carberry – image Pete Cannell CC0

It will be interesting to hear the response from the Scottish Government. Until now Holyrood has been firmly signed up the North Sea Transition Deal and the oil industry agenda, but it has had a firm position of no new nuclear. Similarly, it is now crunch time for the trade unions who have advocated just transition while endorsing the Transition Deal Strategy. The argument at root has been over jobs. It has been the case for a long time now that large-scale investment in renewables creates far more jobs than the same investment in nuclear. Yesterday’s strategy announcement means in effect no transition and no justice. There is an ever more urgent need for the workers movement and the climate movement to work together in opposition to the new strategy (really just the old strategy with more investment in false solutions). Less than 24 hours after its release the strategy has been widely criticised but we will need to do more than oppose this latest attempt at preserving an unacceptable status quo and reject the North Sea transition deal in its entirety.

More on hydrogen, heating and the North Sea

The UK and Scottish governments both remain fully behind the North Sea Transition Deal, which envisages production of oil and gas continuing up to 2050 and beyond. Hydrogen – initial produced from natural gas – is key to the strategy, and the assumption is that hydrogen will replace direct use of natural gas for home cooking and heating, the source of around 23% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions. Hydrogen produced from gas is usually called ‘blue hydrogen’ and while burning hydrogen involves no emissions, the production of blue hydrogen involves the emission of large amounts of carbon dioxide.

Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

The case against the strategy is growing apace. Back in August 2021 Chris Jackson, the chair of the UK Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Association (UKHFCA) resigned just days before the publication of the Westminster government’s hydrogen strategy. He stated:

“I believe passionately that I would be betraying future generations by remaining silent on that fact that blue hydrogen is at best an expensive distraction, and at worst a lock-in for continued fossil fuel use that guarantees we will fail to meet our decarbonisation goals.”

Last week we posted on the findings of research by the Imperial College Energy Futures Lab comparing hydrogen and heat pumps for domestic heating. The report recommended that hydrogen will be important in decarbonising some specific industrial and transport processes but should not be used for domestic heating. Now MPs on the Westminster Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee have come to the same conclusion. The committee’s report slates the government for the lack of clarity in phasing out domestic gas boilers. It argues that hydrogen is not a practical or sustainable solution. And it condemns the lack of urgency shown by the government in organising for and supporting viable alternatives such as heat pumps and district schemes.

We should be clear that despite the evidence to contrary the hydrogen-based strategy for home heating – while driven by the oil and gas industry – remains the policy option preferred by Westminster, Holyrood and some of the major unions. Now’s the time for climate activists in workplaces to insist that unions need to rethink and for of all us to get behind a campaign to phase out North Sea Oil and Gas and end all the attempts to pretend that a net zero oil and gas basin (the purported aim of the North Sea Transition Deal) is possible.

Check out the Scot.E3 briefing for more on this topic.

Briefing – the use and abuse of hydrogen

The latest in our series of briefings. Like all of the briefings this one is just two sides of A4 and is published under a Creative Commons license which means you are welcome to share, adapt and reuse the content. Download a PDF version here.

Abuse

Natural gas used for heating and cooking accounts for around 30% of the UK’s carbon emissions. In contrast burning hydrogen for heat results in zero emissions. So, it appears that replacing natural gas with hydrogen is a no brainer. In this briefing we’ll explain why that’s not the case.

Grey, blue and green?

Much of the current hype is over blue hydrogen. Blue hydrogen is produced from natural gas in the same way as grey – the difference is that the production process incorporates carbon capture and storage. Greenhouse gases are stored rather than released to the atmosphere. Using blue hydrogen for all our domestic heating and cooking would require carbon capture on a massive scale. Large-scale carbon capture is untested, the technology for capture is not yet available and there are serious concerns about the long-term safety of large-scale storage. The production process for blue hydrogen is energy intensive and needs large amounts of green electricity. One example – Northern Gas Networks have a plan to convert domestic gas supplies to hydrogen. The aim is to have converted 15.7 million homes by 2050. This would require 8 million tonnes of hydrogen and need the equivalent of 60 production plants of the size of the largest currently operational plus a huge deployment of unproven carbon capture and storage technology.

Image by Utahraptor ostrommaysi CCBY-SA 3.0

So why the hydrogen hype?

A new hydrogen economy (dependent on carbon capture and storage technology) is at the heart of the North Sea Transition Deal, dreamed up by the industry body Oil and Gas UK, published by the UK government in March 2021 and endorsed by Holyrood. The transition deal aims at continuing extraction of oil and gas through to 2050 and beyond. It is a costly diversion. To be sure of cutting emissions with the speed that is required we need to phase out oil and gas and invest in proven technologies that are based on renewable energy sources.

Use

There is a place for hydrogen in a new sustainable economy. Hydrogen fuel cells supplied with green hydrogen are likely to be an integral part of a full decarbonised economy. Fuel cells work by using hydrogen to produce electricity which can then power a motor instead of using battery power, such as for electric vehicles.

Hydrogen fuel cells are currently better suited than batteries for long distance transport and to transport heavy loads. There are likely to be applications in energy storage and in some very specialised processes that are difficult to decarbonise. Sea transport may be a case in point

Campaign

To decarbonise heat, we need retrofitted insulation, heat pumps and district heating schemes on a mass scale that can only be achieved by the public sector.

Firms producing filthy-dirty “grey” hydrogen must be required to take action to reduce the horrendous levels of greenhouse gas emissions they produce.

Hydrogen use must be limited to applications that are socially useful and don’t add to the climate crisis.

You can find all our briefings on the resources page.

Hydrogen – green gas or greenwash

Thanks to the People and Nature blog for alerting us to this excellent short video which sums up many of the reasons why the hype that surrounds hydrogen is so misguided. You can find links to a couple of longer articles on this issue on our ‘further reading‘ page and to blog posts here and here.

Hydrogen for homes is a terrible idea. We should fight it

We’re pleased to be able to repost this article by Gabriel Levy which was first published on the People and Nature blog. Do check out the People and Nature site which has a wealth of useful and informative resources and follow the site on Twitter @peoplenature

A plan to pipe hydrogen, instead of natural gas, to millions of UK households is being pushed hard by the fossil fuel industry. It sounds “green” – but could wreck efforts to make homes truly zero carbon, using insulation and electric heat pumps.

Oil and gas companies support switching the gas grid to hydrogen, as a survival option in case of decarbonisation, as hydrogen is usually fabricated from gas.

But the hydrogen strategy cuts across the approach recommended for years by housing policy wonks and architects: to use insulation to slash the amount

The gas grid: better to replace it with heat pumps. Photo by Ran-Allen / Creative Commons

of heat needed, and install electric pumps (which work like fridges in reverse).

Leeds Trades Union Council (TUC) last month launched a campaign in favour of retrofitting homes with high-quality insulation and heat pumps.

It’s an issue many people can unite around – those fighting for better housing and tenants’ rights, campaigners against fuel poverty, trades unionists fighting building industry cuts, and all of us who want to tackle climate change.

And there’s a choice to be made we cannot avoid.

If the gas grid is switched to hydrogen, that will block for good the electrification-and insulation approach, that heats homes better, more cheaply, with technology that we know works, and is truly zero-carbon. We cannot have it both ways.

We will be locked into extra dependency on fossil fuels, instead of speeding the shift away from them.

That gas-to-hydrogen switch is being planned in north-east England by Northern Gas Networks (NGN): its H21 project would convert 3.7 million homes and businesses by 2035, and 15.7 million by 2050. NGN is asking the government to fund an engineering study for it.

This article is a guide to the debates and to more information. It covers:

hydrogen and its drawbacks;
whole system solutions: existing technologies to decarbonise heating
the government’s no-strategy strategy and how we could resist it; and
industry lobbying.

There is a short appendix with a non-technical guide to the technologies.

Hydrogen and its drawbacks

Hydrogen is touted as a “green” fuel internationally, because governments seek industry-friendly paths to decarbonisation, and oil and gas companies offer this false solution.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) last year published a report on hydrogen, which noted active support for it by the Chinese, Brazilian, Indian, Australian and many European governments.

In July this year, the European Commission published its “hydrogen strategy for a climate-neutral Europe”, which advocates state support for hydrogen to replace gas in industry and transport – but also mentions household heating as a possible use, as does the European Hydrogen Alliance’s declaration.

Much of this is based on a totally unproved assumption: that technology to produce zero-carbon hydrogen can be made to work at scale. That is a long way off, and may never happen.

There are two supposedly carbon-free types of hydrogen: “blue” hydrogen made from natural gas, from which the carbon is removed and stored; and “green” hydrogen made by electrolysing water. Neither has ever been used at large scale.

At the moment, about 70 million tonnes of hydrogen is produced per year globally, and 98% of it is “grey” hydrogen, made from natural gas … without carbon capture. So it emits a huge amount of greenhouse gases – almost as much as the aviation industry. (See below for more details on the technologies.)

Large-scale “blue” or “green” hydrogen production is far away for three types of reasons.

Cost. The European Commission estimates that “blue” hydrogen would cost €2 a kilogramme at today’s prices, and “green” hydrogen €2.50-€5.50/kg, compared to €1.50/kg for existing “grey” hydrogen.
Technology. “Blue” hydrogen needs carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology that does not yet work at scale anywhere. Transporting hydrogen might not be the walk in the park that some companies claim, either, this presentation suggests.
Resource use. “Green” hydrogen uses huge quantities of electricity and water.

Take the NGN project. It would by 2050 need 8 million tonnes of hydrogen per year, equivalent to 300 Terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity.

To supply that amount of “green” hydrogen, Friends of the Earth says,would need 140 Gigawatts (GW) of wind-powered electrolyser capacity – compared to a current total UK wind capacity of 22 GW (which supplies about one fifth of

The Sun in hydrogen light … but on earth, the hydrogen has to be released from compounds. Photo from the Science Museum

the UK’s electricity). Plus the same amount of water as is used by 1.2 million homes.

If “blue” hydrogen were used instead, 60 plants, as big as the world’s biggest, would have to be built … fitted with that CCS technology that is still in development.

I am not arguing that hydrogen – especially “green” hydrogen – could never be used, during and after the transition away from fossil fuels. But now, it is not a priority or a game-changer.

Today, most hydrogen is used in oil refining and fertiliser manufacture. Hopefully, much of this current use will disappear, along with fossil-fuelled industries. There may well be new uses, because low- or zero-carbon hydrogen might be the best substitute for fossil fuels e.g. to make steel. Hydrogen is also good for storing energy.

But why, in any sane world, would you start by searching for new ways to use hydrogen, as governments are trying to do now?

Why would you even think about using hydrogen to heat people’s homes – when technologies that work, that are already in use (retrofitting, electricity and heat pumps) could do the job better?

You wouldn’t.

Unless you were seeking ways of wringing the last few bits of profit out of oil and gas production.

Whole-systems solutions: existing technologies can decarbonise heating

There is nothing radical about proposing insulation and electric heat pumps to replace gas for households. Recent reports by the Institute for Public Policy Research (advocating a national investment programme), Friends of the Earth (reiterating the value of heat pumps against hydrogen) and the Carbon Trust (on London, arguing that “heat pumps are the primary technology choice”) make the case. For a working retrofitter’s view, see the Sure Insulation site.

Government and parliamentary reviews, too, have found that heat pumps and insulation are the way to go. (They have also looked at a hybrid heat pump system, in which a heat pump provides heat for 85% of the time, but switches to a gas boiler during colder periods.)

The government’s business and industry department (BEIS) did a big review of home heating options in 2018. It concluded that, first, there should be a “growth in no or low-regrets low carbon heating” measures, including heat pumps, biomass boilers and solar water heaters. But BEIS said that, long term, all technologies had to be looked at – and kept the hydrogen option open, by commissioning the engineering company Arup to do a feasability study.

The parliamentary Committee on Climate Change also did a big study on hydrogen in 2018, and concluded that it is “best used selectively, where it adds most value alongside widespread electrification” – and providing CCS could be got to work properly. Most urgent, the CCC pointed out, is “strategic certainty about how the decarbonisation of heat will be delivered in the UK”.

(The detailed analysis for the CCC was done at Imperial College. It showed that a hydrogen-based approach would be more expensive, especially if the aim were zero carbon, and that up-front investment makes more sense to stop emissions. There is more from Imperial on “smart and flexible heat” here.)

All this paperwork underlines that an integrated approach is needed. Buildings need to be upgraded and insulated; different types of heat pumps and different installation methods are called for; expertise and training have to be developed; in some areas, district heating networks make sense.

This is exactly the sort of thing local government has always done, and the neo-liberal assault on local government makes it harder. That’s discussed in research of heat systems governance by Janette Webb (see her articles including “New Lamps for Old”, “Emerging linked ecologies for a national-scale retrofitting programme” and one on why heat decarbonisation cannot be done by markets).

The no-strategy strategy, and how to oppose it

In the face of this pile of evidence that, more than anything, home heating needs a strategy – the government has avoided adopting a strategy. It “has yet to make any firm decisions about which pathways it prefers”, this report on the Renewable Technology site explained in July.

The politics of this is very clear.

In the face of climate crisis, the government must choose between an integrated strategy, best implemented through local government, relying on existing technology … or a no-strategy strategy that takes the lead

Insulation works, and it cuts down the need for heat

from powerful private companies with unproven technology.

The no-strategy strategy fits with this government’s maniacal, neoliberal hatred of the public sector – one of its few ideological principles. That was what motivated its no-strategy strategy on coronavirus testing and tracing, with devastating results, costing tens of thousands of lives.

A heat decarbonisation strategy will have to be fought for in opposition to the government – just as health workers, scientists and others have had to fight for a coronavirus strategy.

This is why the Leeds TUC initiative, which appeals to local government to act, is welcome.

The Leeds TUC has recognised a techno-fix for what it is – damaging to society and the labour movement. Its campaign could be a focus for all who want to tackle dangerous climate change.

If you are in a trade union, an environmental campaign group or a community organisation, please discuss the Leeds TUC’s document and the actions it proposes.

If you are in a union, you could challenge trade union leaders’ support for the oil and gas industry’s hydrogen initiative.

Instead of such support, the labour movement should:

First, embrace technologies that are in society’s best interests – which for heat decarbonisation means retrofitted insulation and heat pumps;

Second, demand that firms producing filthy-dirty “grey” hydrogen take action to reduce the horrendous levels of greenhouse gas emissions they produce; and

Third, urge that future hydrogen use be limited to applications that are socially useful and don’t add to the climate crisis.

This approach could and should be part of a broader perspective of just transition, now starting to be discussed by workers on the North Seawhere the gas is produced.

Lobbying on steroids

The H21 project is at a crossroads. The companies who sponsor it – NGN, the gas network firm Cadent and the Norwegian oil company Equinor – got state funding for a series of initial reports: £9 million from the Ofgem Network Innovation Competition (NIC) in 2017, mainly to fund safety assessments; and another £6.8 million in 2019 to test the technology at a specially-built site at Spadeadam. (Update from a H21 manager here.)

But H21’s plea for a much larger dollop of state funding – £125 million, half the cost of a Front End Engineering and Design (FEED) study, originally scheduled to start this year – has not so far been heeded, despite the “urgency” explained in the H21 North of England report (available here, although temporarily (October 2020) missing).

Meanwhile, the government has announced another project – to support an industrial complex on Teesside, making “blue” hydrogen for transport – that could be an alternative source of demand for natural gas being pumped from the North Sea … and has as little as H21 to do with tackling the climate emergency.

Despite the question marks over H21, the oil and gas industry’s lobbying machine in support of hydrogen for heat decarbonisation is trundling on, with greater force than ever.

In July, the All Party Parliamentary Group on Hydrogen issued a reporturging “more ambitious” support for hydrogen, including “mandating hydrogen-ready boilers by 2025”.

And in August, the gas industry “scored a success in persuading the Environmental Audit Committee [of the House of Commons] to back its plans for using hydrogen […] in domestic heating”, the 100% Renewable UK blog reported.

The committee chair, Philip Dunne MP, deceitfully suggested that hydrogen is “the most cost-effective option” for “parts of the UK energy system”.

Tom Baxter, a chemical engineering researcher, questions the pro-hydrogen arguments in this article.

Gas network companies have also jumped on the post-Covid financing bandwagon, asking for a huge state hand-out for conversion to hydrogen. And cement manufacturers – who, like energy companies, need carbon capture and storage – have joined the queue for state funding.

These relentless lobbying efforts are funded by a range of companies including hydrogen, transport, carbon capture, gas network, engineering and chemical firms as well as oil and gas. Their greenwash proliferates through the Decarbonised Gas Alliance and Hydrogen Strategy Now.

Some good research on these lobbyists’ methods, by academics at Exeter University and Imperial College, warns of “the capacity that incumbents have to promote their storyline”.

Hydrogen. Quick technological catch-up

Hydrogen is the most common, and lightest, element in the universe, but only exists on earth combined with other elements. People started fabricating hydrogen from compounds and using it e.g. for balloons in the nineteenth century. Today there are three main types of hydrogen:

■ “Grey” hydrogen. Fabricated by removing the hydrogen (H) from methane i.e. natural gas (CH4), or from coal. This is how 98% of hydrogen is currently made. It is extremely emissions-intensive. For every tonne of hydrogen made from gas, 10 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) goes into the atmosphere;

The Petra Nova carbon capture and storage plant, recently mothballed. Photo by RM VM (creative commons)

hydrogenfor every tonne from coal, 19 tonnes of CO2.

The 70m tonnes of hydrogen produced in 2018 caused 830m tonnes of CO2 emissions, the IEA calculated. That’s a healthy chunk of the world total of 42 billion tonnes – about the same as total emissions from Indonesia plus the UK – and nearly as much as the global aviation industry, which emitted 915m tonnes in 2019.

Most hydrogen produced now is used for oil refining, and ammonia production to make chemical fertilisers. Some is used as part of synthetic gas products, mainly for manufacturing steel, or methanol.

■ “Blue” hydrogen. In this process, instead of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere, it is captured and stored. The capture process, steam reformation, is straightforward for about 70% of the emissions and gets really tricky above and beyond about 85%.

Steam reformation splits methane into CO2 and synthetic gas (carbon monoxide plus hydrogen); in the second stage, the synthetic gas is mixed with steam; more CO2 is removed and hydrogen produced. Other similar processes are partial oxidation, which uses oxygen in the air as an oxidant instead of steam, and autothermal reforming, which combines both methods.

Note on carbon capture and storage. This can also be used in gas- and coal-fired power stations. Usually the carbon is captured after the fuel has been burned. Then, as with carbon from hydrogen production, it has to be transported and stored. CCS has been in development for about 40 years, but there are still only 20 projects in development in the world. Only two of these ever actually functioned, and one of those two (Petra Nova in Texas) was mothballed in August. (A good analysis is here.) CCS is greenwashed as the key to “green power”. Some politicians, and some international climate talks documentation, claim that bioenergy with CCS could play a big role in global decarbonisation, but climate scientists and engineers think that is nonsense.

■ “Green” hydrogen. Produced by electrolysis of water. The electricity could come from fossil fuels (in which case it would not be green), nuclear power or renewables. The process is proven, but is very energy intensive and very inefficient.

If electricity from renewables were to be used, this could be the most “carbon light” way of producing hydrogen. But huge targets for “green” hydrogen production are sometimes published without being reconciled with other huge targets for renewably-produced electricity. Is producing hydrogen ever going to be the best way to use this electricity? The IEA says that just to produce the 70m tonnes of hydrogen the world economy uses annually would need 3600 TWh of electricity, more than total European consumption. The electrolysis also needs huge amounts of water – 9 litres for each kilo of hydrogen.

Gazprom, the Russian gas company, sees potential in producing hydrogen by methane pyrolysis, a related technology. GL, 30 October 2020.

Find out more about the Leeds TUC initiative:

■ Retrofit Leeds homes with high-quality insulation and heat pumps: a plan and call to action, by Leeds TUC

■ Leeds trade unionists: zero carbon homes can help tackle climate change, by People & Nature

Hydrogen Debate and the Future of Heat

We are pleased to publish a contribution to the growing debate on the use of Hydrogen to replace north sea gas for domestic heating written by Pete Roche – the article was originally published in the bulletin of Nuclear Free Local Authorities.

An argument about the future use of hydrogen, in particular for heating, has been raging amongst energy professionals and lobbyists since the Government announced it was looking at setting a date by which all boilers on sale would be “hydrogen ready”, meaning they can burn natural gas but can also be converted easily to burning hydrogen. It was also announced that the natural gas supply at Keele University is being blended with 20% hydrogen in a trial that’s of national significance.

Households could soon be required to install a boiler capable of burning hydrogen when they next upgrade their central heating system. The government has already pledged to ban installation of fossil fuel heating systems in new homes from 2025. In November Sajid Javid, the chancellor, visited the headquarters of Worcester Bosch to inspect its prototype hydrogen-ready boiler. The company says the boilers would be available by 2025. They would be £50-£100 more expensive than existing boilers, which typically cost about £900. The benefit over existing boilers is that they can continue burning natural gas but be converted to burning hydrogen in an operation that will cost about £150 and take a gas engineer one hour.

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy’s Hy4Heat programme aims to determine the feasibility of hydrogen for heating in homes and includes work with industry to develop prototype hydrogen appliances, including hydrogen ready boilers. About 1.7 million boilers are replaced each year so if they were required to be hydrogen-ready from 2025 most homes would have the necessary boiler by the mid-2030s to allow a switch to hydrogen. (1)

One of the arguments in favour of converting our gas boilers to hydrogen is that we have poorly insulated houses with insufficient space for installing a heat pump. If you were to design a heating policy from scratch, you would not choose hydrogen. You would build well-insulated houses that use electric heat pumps. (2) Worcester Bosch argues that a house needs to have an Energy Performance Certificate rating of C or above for a heat pump to be able to heat the house effectively. According to them of the 3,276,000 UK properties within the EPC band C rating, some 3,223,000 have a condensing boiler. One of the ways of jumping one clear band within the EPC methodology is to replace a non-condensing boiler with a condensing version. This means that many of the properties in band C are really constructed to band D levels of fabric and therefore unsuitable as they stand for a heat pump installation. (3)

Dave Toke, reader in energy politics at Aberdeen University agrees. He calls it: “the start of one of the greatest pieces of greenwash that have been committed in the UK.” The oil and gas industry is promoting so-called ‘blue hydrogen’, that is hydrogen produced by ‘reforming’ natural gas, and capturing the carbon dioxide that is produced. Yet currently most hydrogen is produced by reforming natural gas and not capturing carbon dioxide, a process that will dramatically increase carbon dioxide emissions if hydrogen is used to heat homes. The efficiency of the gas reformation process is only around 65% meaning that much more carbon dioxide is generated to produce the hydrogen as fuel compared to simply burning the natural gas. He says any claims that the process will be done using carbon capture and storage, beyond that is a few demonstration projects supported by public grants, should be taken with a wagon load of salt.

But even if ‘green’ hydrogen generated by renewable energy were used, it would still be a grossly inefficient way of using that renewable energy. Renewable energy is normally distributed through the electricity system where it can power heat pumps in homes (either individually or through district heating systems) to much greater effect. The heat pumps use electricity much more efficiently compared to any hydrogen boilers, no matter how the hydrogen is produced. Indeed, a heat pump may increase the efficiency of the use of renewable energy by approaching fourfold compared to using ‘green hydrogen’ in a boiler. (4)

Richard Black from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) told BBC News: “We will and should have hydrogen in the mix of energy options, but it’s not a wonder solution to everything, which you sometimes get the impression from the rhetoric. There is hope – but too much hype.” (5)

Commentators also argue about the cost with some saying hydrogen will prove too expensive for mass usage, while others say switching to the use of electricity for heating will be far more costly than gas central heating and will put enormous strains on the grid during the winter months. However, heat battery manufacturer, Sunamp, claims that using an air source heat pump on off- peak electricity in conjunction with a heat battery can heat a house for a price comparable with gas central heating.

Lord Deben, chair of the Committee on Climate Change, has expressed confidence that a way will be found to produce hydrogen, which could provide a low carbon substitute for natural gas in heating systems, cheaper than is currently possible. (6)

The Commonweal Common Home Plan (see below) is sceptical about relying on the conversion of the gas grid to hydrogen. And moving to electric heating would roughly increase by a factor of five peak load on the grid which would require significant upgrades to cope. It prefers instead the idea of building district heating networks which can deliver heat from solar thermal, geothermal and industrial waste heat recovery.

New research commissioned by industry body Scottish Renewables shows the Scottish Government’s new Heat Networks Bill could see the equivalent of 460,000 homes – around a fifth of Scotland’s total – heated renewably by 2030, cutting emissions from heat by 10% and helping tackle the climate emergency. The research found 46 potential heat network projects across Scotland’s seven cities. The networks would initially serve 45,000 homes but could, with the right Scottish Government support, grow ten-fold by 2030. (7)

To date the Scottish Government has said the new Heat Networks Bill will “support, facilitate and create controls [for] the development of district heating” – but is yet to confirm the details. In response to this ongoing uncertainty industry has published, alongside the new research, a set of recommendations on how the Bill should support new projects. The potential projects represent a significant economic opportunity. Civil engineering such as the digging of trenches and laying of pipes accounts for 40% of a typical heat network’s costs, often using locally-sourced labour.

Star Renewable Energy, has installed a heat pump which can extract the small amount of heat generated by the Clyde. The river has an average temperature of around 10oC but engineers can boost it up to 80oC for use in homes. (8)

Meanwhile the HyDeploy pilot involving injecting hydrogen into Keele University’s existing natural gas network, which supplies 30 faculty buildings and 100 domestic properties is now operational. (9) And 7 industrial partners have been pledged to support a demonstration project in Denmark, which, with offshore wind as a power source, will produce renewable hydrogen that can be used in road transport. (10)

Times 4th Jan 2020 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hydrogen-boilers-may-be-only-choice-for-homes- by-2025-2rw5t3tpt
Times 4th Jan 2020 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/an-exciting-carbon-free-future-depends-on- hydrogen-boilers-6ktqwpgw0
See The Future of Fuel, Worcester Bosch, 2019 https://www.worcester- bosch.co.uk/img/documents/hydrogen/The_Future_of_Fuel.pdf
Dave Toke’s Blog 4th Jan 2020 https://realfeed-intariffs.blogspot.com/2020/01/why-uk-government-may- be-encouraging.html
BBC 2nd Jan 2020 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-50873047
Edie 6th Dec 2019 https://www.edie.net/news/10/Lord-Deben-chides-politicians-for-failing-to-act-on-decarbonisation-of-heat/Scottish Renewables 11th Nov 2019
https://scottishrenewables.createsend.com/campaigns/reports/viewCampaign.aspx
Times 12th Nov 2019 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/667e8b5c-04d4-11ea-872c-a98e8bfab8fc
Edie 2nd Jan 2020 https://www.edie.net/news/8/UK-s-first-grid-injected-hydrogen-trials-begin-in-Staffordshire/
Orsted 20th Dec 2019 https://orsted.com/da/Media/Newsroom/News/2019/12/945369984118407

The scale of pressure on domestic gas boiler

The scale of pressure on domestic gas boiler image by Marco Verch CC BY 2.0