Green Hydrogen pushed hard

Trade body RenewableUK wants the UK to become a global leader in the development of green hydrogen. It says the UK government must publish a hydrogen strategy detailing how the fuel will evolve from a niche alternative to a central driver of the net zero transition. 

RUK’s report Renewable Hydrogen - Seizing the UK Opportunity calls on the government to back green hydrogen, produced using renewable energy, by supporting the renewable sector as it attempts to replicate the success of the UK's offshore wind industry: ‘The Strategy should include a clear plan to deliver the first gigawatt of electrolyser capacity in the UK, identifying potential projects and funding where appropriate to drive innovation and investment, including "at scale" demonstrations for production and storage’.

RUK recommends setting a target of 5GW of renewable electrolyser capacity by 2030 and 10GW by 2035, along with a cost reduction target of £2 per kilogram of green hydrogen by 2030, from £8/kg currently. This would mean that by 2030, green hydrogen would be at least cost-competitive with blue hydrogen, made from fossil methane coupled with carbon capture & storage (CCS). Zero carbon green hydrogen would help the UK to reach its net zero emission goal faster, the report argues, as current CCS technology fails to capture up to a fifth of all carbon emissions- so its low but not zero carbon. 

RUK noted that the UK already had a head start in the global race to commercialise green hydrogen, with major trials such as the Gigastack project in the Humber involving UK pioneer ITM Power. Business Green’s coverage quoted RUK’s director of future electricity systems Barnaby Wharton taking it up : ‘Renewable hydrogen is the next big global industry in the decades ahead. The UK is well placed to lead this new industry, with plentiful renewable resources and world leading hydrogen companies’. 

In parallel, a report by the Offshore Wind Industry Council (OWIC) and the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult said that developing a green hydrogen industry could create 120,000 jobs and deliver £320bn to the UK economy by 2050. It said the UK has the right nexus of factors - a strong industrial base, world-leading academic research and offshore wind capacity potential – to produce low cost, sustainable hydrogen without CO2 emissions from water electrolysis. The ‘Solving the Integration Challenge’ report claimed that, if pursued, hydrogen could become a major new manufacturing sector in the UK and a cheaper, cleaner alternative to blue hydrogen that is produced from methane. ‘With accelerated deployment, green hydrogen costs can be competitive with those from methane-based production with CCS (blue hydrogen) by the early 2030s’.

In response to this lobbying effort, the government said hydrogen had the potential to be ‘a vital part of the UK's future net zero energy mix’. It would be setting out its hydrogen strategy in due course, but it was already investing £120m into exploring the use of hydrogen as a fuel for heating, transport & industry. 

Hydrogen opposed 

However not everyone is on side!  The Times ran an editorial (24/9/20) under the heading ‘fuel’s gold’ calling for caution; there was a big gap between aspirations and tangible actuality. It pointed to the fear that ‘a premature rush to hydrogen, as advocated by fossil fuel giants with vested interests in keeping fossil fuel burning, will compound rather than solve Britain’s emissions problem’. That’s fair enough, many environmentalists are against fossil- derived blue hydrogen, but the Times also came out against green hydrogen: it was ‘prohibitively expensive’ and there wasn’t a sufficient renewable surplus to make it.   

As I noted in an earlier post, a similar pattern of response had already emerged from Leeds Trades Union Congress. It came out against blue hydrogen for heating, as in the H21 gas conversion/CCS project proposed for Leeds: ‘Projects such as H21 inevitably mean massive diversion of resources away from genuine decarbonisation and into infrastructure that locks in fossil-fuel dependency for years to come’. However, the Leeds TUC were also uncertain about ‘green’ hydrogen- produced via electrolysis using renewable electricity: ‘The capacity to produce a “green” hydrogen from water at the scale and cost required is a distant prospect, in part because it would require a huge input of renewable-produced electricity - making it nonsensical as an alternative to electrification of home heating’. 

Instead they want to use electric heat pumps since, it is argued, they can supply 3-4 times more heat than directly used power- and P2G electrolysis may only be 60-70% efficient, so you would need even more power to get the same heat output via the hydrogen route.  Indeed, Cambridge Mech Eng. Prof. David Cebon claimed in a letter to the Times (24.9.20), that the hydrogen route ‘would consume 6 times more electricity to heat a house than an electric heat pump’.

As I have argued before, the reality is a bit more complex. The UK gas grid handles up to four time more energy than the power grid, so using gas grid for heating makes more sense I in terms of transmission than trying to do it using the power grid. Otherwise, to meet heat demand directly with power, we would have to expand the power grid. Electrolysis yields a storable gas and it can be produced using renewable surpluses at non-peak demand times. So it avoids the need to meet heat demand with real time power- something that could seriously strain the power grid at peak heat and power demand times. Moreover, heat pumps conversion efficiency, although usually high, varies with the weather, and may be low in winter. So, as I have said before, there are issues with the heat pump route too.

As a compromise, and to avoid having to upgrade the power grid, the UK government have come out in favour of hybrid domestic heat pumps with ancillary gas fired boilers included alongside electric heat pumps, to meet winter peak heat demand- and longer term they see hydrogen being used instead of fossil gas in them. So it’s a mixed system. 

So there may be some ancillary role for green hydrogen as a heating option. It can also play many other roles for example for process heating in industry, for powering some vehicles and for grid balancing, although that too has been challenged. BNEFs’ Michael Liebreich looks critically at all hydrogen end uses and says green hydrogen may remain too expensive compared with fossil gas in many cases. I will be looking at that in my next post- it is debatable! That is even more the case for nuclear derived hydrogen. In the same way as the fossil fuel interests may see hydrogen as lifeline, so too do some in the nuclear lobby. The battle on that also continues.