A review of the benefits and challenges of hydrogen and carbon capture utilization and storage, by an international team led by Prof. Ben Sovocool at Sussex University, is based on interviews with engineers and other experts in areas of the UK where local industrial cluster projects are planned or underway. The review adopts a neutral approach, attempting to assess the technical, economic and social pros and cons, but it soon becomes clear form the interview material that there are strong views in this area.
Some is just understandable and reasonable incumbent technological and skills partisanship. For example, one benefit of deploying hydrogen in clusters is said to be that there is already a trained workforce in such areas, as well as existing infrastructure. A participant said that ‘we have been handling and moving hydrogen for 70 years. We have 1600 miles of dedicated hydrogen pipeline. We know how to handle it. We know how to move it. We know how to respond to an emergency. We know how to prevent emergencies. We know how to leak-detect.’
In terms of CCUS, one expert said: ‘I think there is enough expertise & experience out there. I think you also have oil & gas companies, the likes of BPs & Shells of this world, or Harbour Energies of this world, as we have in our area, who are very familiar with operating gas or gas liquid systems. They are very familiar with operating reservoirs & drilling or pumping gas.’ Another said that incumbent firms, mostly in the oil & gas sector, have ‘got all of this infrastructure, all of these pipes and tubes and basins. They've got all of these skills around engineering, & the logical thing for them to do, therefore, is to deploy the technology’.
CCU also had a geographic element. It was claimed that the UK ‘has an advantage because it has places in the North Sea where you can stick carbon dioxide, and places where you can stick it underneath the sea rather than underneath the land, where, if you tried to have land-based carbon storage, I think you would have a lot of local opposition to it. You'd have in the same issues we see with resistance to fracking. The fact that it's done offshore, outside, is actually an advantage for the UK. Having the North Sea is a big advantage in that respect.’
However, there were also merits in hydrogen production. Most of it at present is made by steam reformation of natural gas, but it is possible, although more expensive, to make so- called green hydrogen by electrolysis using power from renewable sources. Then its zero carbon. Alternatively, and at less cost, the research team noted the IEA’s view that, by 2070, around a quarter of global hydrogen production could be derived as blue hydrogen, derived from fossil gas with CCS to make it low but not zero carbon. However, that raised hackles, with an expert commenting: ‘blue hydrogen is a scam.... the only useful hydrogen is green hydrogen, but only for certain applications, and those include long-distance transport, steel production, and ammonia production, and maybe for combined heat and power in remote microgrids, but not for home heating, not for passenger vehicles, not for stationary electricity storage.’
Another expert commented on similar lines: ‘blue hydrogen with CCS just perpetuates continued gas exploration with all the challenges associated with going into sensitive parts of the planet and keep digging to find that additional gas.’ And another said CCS is ‘enabling companies to sidestep the urgency to transition to renewables’. Locking us into fossil...
There did seem to be a bit of a consensus emerging on this, with yet another expert saying that, ‘blue hydrogen and many other business models emerging from CCS are a scam, designed to keep the fossil fuel industry in business. There's no other point of it”. Well if you are a cynical then you might conclude that blue hydrogen with CCS will boom!
The research team make no specific recommendations on industrial decarbonisation technology, but do make it clear that, as well as there being issues with CCUS, there there are also operational issues with green hydrogen and indeed hydrogen generally, such as NOx production when its burnt and embrittlement of transmission pipes. It also makes clear that all the options have economic costs- with CCUS still being a relatively new idea and green hydrogen production still being in its infancy. However, the team’s main concern is to explore the socio-cultural aspects of the industrial cluster development of these technologies, something that is also explored, in a wider more general UK strategic transition context, in a second paper, which has more of an industrial decarbonisation policy focus.
Both studies draw on the same research data base of 111 UK local interviews. Although the second study, a bit surprisingly, concludes that ‘so far, the policy focus centred on technological systems and infrastructure appears well thought out’, the first study says that that for the decarbonisation programme to continue to unfold effectively, an integrated holistic approach will have to be adopted. Well yes. For example, it notes that we have seen local residents resist plans for hydrogen heating in their homes and it is far from clear whether there will actually be sufficient skilled people for the various cluster projects. As a respondent said, commenting on the project in the Humber area, ‘you are looking at somewhere between 25 000 to maybe 30 000 jobs to make this happen. But where are they going to come from?’
So yes, we are looking to quite big potential changes with major local social impacts. Best make sure then that the route ahead is well thought out, and, although this study does quote a respondent’s view that a ‘people from the industry’ believe that ‘the only way to comply with climate targets is through hydrogen and CCS; there is no other way to do it’, that may not be true, or at least only partly true- as I argued in an earlier post on carbon removal, there are other options.
*Sadly neither the Tory or Labour election manifestos get into these arguably crucial nuances. They just back unspecified hydrogen and CCUS. The Greens just back lots of renewables. But the Lib Dems do include green hydrogen in their storage proposals.
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