GREEN HYDROGEN IS THE FUTURE - WE NEED TO PROTECT THE PLANET, NOT BIG OIL
Like most people involved in cleantech engineering I felt deeply disappointed (but not surprised) by the UK Government’s recently released Hydrogen Strategy.
What did surprise me though was the centralised planning approach and almost Soviet tone - politicians trying to drive innovation by issuing directives, economic targets, and regulations.
The UK Can Lead In Green Hydrogen Technology
The UK has a genuine opportunity to be a global leader in green hydrogen technology. It is generally accepted that large vehicles (trucks, ships, aeroplanes) are too heavy to be powered by batteries. Hydrogen is the only fuel source available today that has sufficient energy density to replace oil in vehicles that weigh much more than a passenger car. Hydrogen propulsion is not dream technology of the future: it will be powering commercially viable vehicles in hard-to-decarbonise areas of the global economy in the next few years.
Hence, the opportunity is clear, and the means to seize it is so much simpler than the Hydrogen Strategy would lead one to believe. It is not about the government picking solutions like electric road systems (the promise of motorways with overhead cables to power electric trucks, from the government which has yet to electrify half its rail network).
Green Hydrogen is Zero-Emission
The government is over-complicating the issue because it is trying to do two incompatible things at the same time. It says it wants zero-emission green hydrogen and it also wants (theoretically) low emission blue hydrogen. Blue hydrogen is derived from hydrocarbons, so it naturally provides a great market for oil and gas companies. They promise that most of the pollution will be captured and stored underground. It is the same empty promise that hydrocarbon-based power stations would be made clean by carbon capture and storage – or that fracking would be an important part of the UK energy mix.
The fact is that all these clumsy, over-complicated attempts to turn carbon-based fuel into carbon-free energy are doomed. While old-economy companies spent the last 20 years developing all sorts of cunning plans to produce hydrocarbons without the carbon, the falling prices of wind and solar power rendered their schemes completely irrelevant.
Green Hydrogen is Self-Evidently Superior to Blue
It is the same story with green hydrogen. The zero-emissions process of electrolysing water with wind or solar energy is self-evidently superior to taking hydrocarbons, using large amounts of energy to split them into their constituent parts, and then pumping the unwanted portion into underground caverns miles offshore.
The fact that Chris Jackson, former chair UK Hydrogen & Fuel Cell Association stepped down just before the Hydrogen Strategy was published speaks volumes. He refused to endorse blue hydrogen, calling it an “expensive distraction.” It is certainly expensive but, of course, to directors of oil companies, it is the whole point of the exercise.
The UK Government Should Commit to Green Hydrogen Technology
How absurd that the UK Government is using “green” policy to subsidise oil and gas companies. No wonder the UK Hydrogen Strategy runs to 120 pages, as it tries to obfuscate the contradictions at the heart of its strategy. When you look past the document’s headlines, there is no firm commitment to green hydrogen technology. The “£1 billion fund to accelerate commercialisation of low-carbon technologies and systems for net zero,” looks more like a billion-pound hand out to the gas and oil industry.
To meet our net-zero targets, decarbonise the UK economy and export our success globally, we have to create a world-leading market in green hydrogen to ensure it is cost-competitive. That is not special pleading, it is just basic economics.
Green Hydrogen Needs the Same Policy as Renewable Energy
The solution does not need 120 pages to explain because it has already been used in the creation of the UK offshore wind industry. Offshore wind subsidies have fallen year-by-year as production costs have plummeted (down by two-thirds between 2015 and 2019). Electricity from offshore wind is on target to be cheaper than electricity from gas power stations within a couple of years. Green hydrogen needs the same policy – subsidies that enable it to compete with fossil fuels and drive down production costs. Green hydrogen can get to subsidy-free price parity in about the same time it took wind energy. At that point, we will have a clean transport system: batteries for small vehicle and some of our trains, and green hydrogen for the other vehicles.
That policy would enable the UK’s abundance of brilliant engineers to lead the world in creating technologies for the hydrogen age. The government needs to support what will be one of the fastest growing industries of the 21st century, not offer palliative care to a doomed industry from the 20th century.
- Timothy Lyons, CEO Viritech
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