The Big Hydrogen Distraction
How the lightest element is diverting our attention away from more promising, impactful and affordable climate technologies.
Frank Zappa said that stupidity, not hydrogen, is the most plentiful building block of the universe. Although many scientists would dispute this statement, it increasingly looks like policymakers are proving him right. In the States a bipartisan majority has backed the Inflation Reduction Act which will provide $26Bn of funding for hydrogen projects, plus a further $100Bn in uncapped tax credits. Across the Atlantic, the EU has committed €5.2 Bn with the aim of catalysing private sector investment of a further €7Bn.
The problem is, hydrogen won’t significantly reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for many of the use cases where it is being hyped, be that land transport, aviation and shipping, heavy industry or domestic heating. It also needs saying that hydrogen comes in a variety of different forms, some less green than others and all of them significantly more expensive than alternatives. (For an overview of the eight different types / colours of hydrogen scroll to the end of this article).
So why are governments backing hydrogen to the tune of billions? Are we at risk of being led down the same greenwashed garden path as carbon offsets and industrial scale carbon capture?
The Usual Suspects
Why is hydrogen getting off so lightly? It could be to do with the aggressive (and so far successful) lobbying of the Hydrogen Council; a group that contains BP, Shell, Total, Equinor and Aramco. These actors have a vested interest in supplying the vast amounts of fossil fuels required to produce the nearer in forms of grey and blue hydrogen. Similarly, gas network providers and some boiler manufacturers have lined up behind “hydrogen ready” technology, because a shift, to say heat pumps, would leave them with a lot of stranded assets.
In the absence of a Plan B, Plan A has become Plan H.
But I don‘t want to slide into the easy explanation that incumbents with a lot to lose are up to their usual dastardly deeds, even if they definitely are. The bigger story is that hydrogen ignorance is manifesting itself in stupid choices.
Swiss Knife
Hydrogen has been successfully framed as the Swiss army knife of decarbonisation: practical, affordable and applicable to a broad range of use cases:
Look a little more closely, read a few peer reviewed studies and engage your critical thinking faculties, however and it quickly emerges that this is simply untrue. The knife, is in fact a spoon.
Gaslighting
Hydrogen hype has a lot in common with gaslighting. The linguistic irony is hard to miss, and so are its familiar tactics : overpromise, over simplify, lobby hard, sow the seeds of confusion so the majority non-experts don’t know what to believe, then underdeliver. The objective, as always, is to maximise short term shareholder value. Sadly, the consequences of all this skullduggery are that vast amounts of government and private capital will be diverted away from more promising decarbonisation technologies, and significantly more GHGs will be emitted into the atmosphere.
The Merit Order of Competing Technologies
Hydrogen does have a competitive advantage in some areas, like the manufacture of fertiliser, but electricity and battery based technologies make a lot more sense — both in terms of carbon reduction potential but also cost — for a lot of the use cases where hydrogen is currently being touted; be that domestic heating, aviation or ground transportation. Some will argue that costs will fall as hydrogen scales, but this a fallacy that fails to understand that the high input costs of producing hydrogen will always mean that cost efficiencies are limited, unlike say the manufacture of PV cells used for solar installations. The cost of living crisis, precipitated in large part by rising domestic heating bills, has demonstrated that households are unable to bear higher heating costs, even with generous government subsidies in place. Blue hydrogen costs about the same as gas. Green hydrogen is the equivalent of heating your home with Dom Pérignon, whilst heat pumps are around six times cheaper than the projected costs of hydrogen.
Comparing costs per Megawatt hour (MWh)
⛽ Gas : €30–35 wholesale five year average, has increased to €65 since Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
🔵 Blue hydrogen : €65
🟢 Green hydrogen : €190–200
✊ Heat pumps : €10–15
So let’s dive a little deeper into home energy because it accounts for 10.9% of global GHG emissions, and is the area where normal people like you and I can have the greatest, positive environmental impact by backing the right technology. Yes, more so than drinking from a reusable coffee cup, going vegan or driving an electric vehicle.
So what are our options?
The ignorant option would be to install a hydrogen ready boiler, in the hope that a fuel which is highly combustible and uses 2.12 units of energy in the production and distribution process for every unit delivered to the home, whilst embrittling the pipes needed to transport it, will be ready to heat your home by 2026. Then, to be carbon neutral your boiler would need to run on green hydrogen or blue hydrogen with direct carbon capture — which we know captures far less carbon than claimed. To top it off, hydrogen produces six times more Nitrogen Oxides (NOx) when burnt in air than natural gas, and it is NOx that negatively impacts people with breathing difficulties like asthma. Having removed a lot of NOx from busy urban centres across Europe, through the creation of Low Emission Zones, we would be undoing a lot of this good work by backing hydrogen.
A massive waste of energy
David Cebon, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Cambridge University, has estimated that the UK would need 385 gigawatts (GW) of renewable-energy capacity to produce enough hydrogen to heat homes cleanly. (Current wind capacity is about 26GW). In other words, the UK would need to build a vast number of wind and solar farms, and probably a few nuclear power stations too, to hit the target. It is worth adding that using wind to generate hydrogen, and then using that for heat means 54% of the original energy input is lost in production and distribution.
Cebon has helpfully sketched this out in a colourful diagram. TL;DR: the big yellow block on the left of the image represents the total amount of input energy, the orange arrows are energy loss occurring from distribution.
The Case for Electric Heat Pumps
There is now enough evidence to suggest that heating our homes with hydrogen is a highly combustible pipe dream. It is not a viable alternative to fossil fuel based heating systems, and is fast becoming a dangerous distraction that is slowing the adoption of more promising and impactful technologies. Indeed a total of 37 independent studies have concluded there should be no role for hydrogen in heating homes. Thirty seven.
Energy researcher and author of this meta-analysis, Jan Rosenow hits the nail on the head when he says:
“The International Energy Agency says no more fossil fuel heating systems should get installed after 2025 to meet net zero targets. Many countries have adopted and announced such bans and once put in place, investment in heat pumps has followed [but] mixed messages around hydrogen for heating and the lack of clarity about the future of the gas grid is not aiding the transition away from fossil heating [in the UK and other countries]”.
So here is my case your honour:
- Heat pumps are six times cheaper than hydrogen, and have a Coefficient of Performance (COP) ranging from 2.5 to 5.0, which means they use 2.5 to 5 times less energy to heat our homes than fossil fuels. But very few people are aware of this. A BEIS Public Attitudes Survey at the end of 2022 found that 80% of British consumers have little or no awareness of air source heat pumps, which is one of the principal reasons why installations are lagging behind:
2. But consumers face higher installation costs, €15k for an air source heat pump and €20k + for a ground source heat pump. This compares to a mere €2k for a gas boiler or “hydrogen ready” boiler. These upfront costs are a barrier and a deterrent, even if running costs are cheaper over the lifetime of the asset.
3. Although grants like the Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS) exist in the UK, and equivalents in other EU markets, the customer journey from positive climate intention to heat pump installation is fragmented and confusing. Answering questions like “how do I apply for a grant”, “what is the right heat pump for my property”, “where can I find a verified installer” and “how much will I save on my energy bills” requires a lot of googling, and throws up a lot conflicting information. Believe me, I’ve tried. It leaves us piecing together a puzzle, and most of us have better things to do than puzzle away. So inevitably, nothing happens. Only heat pump hobbyists like James get around to retrofitting their Victorian properties, and there simply aren’t enough James’s in the world to save us from climate change.
4. To pave the way for a transition to an early majority more EU governments need to close the “spark gap”, shorthand for the price difference between fossil fuels and electricity arising from an unequal regime of taxes and levies. Fossil fuels are massively under taxed because governments want to ensure energy security in the absence of affordable alternatives to gas heating, whilst electricity is massively overtaxed, meaning it is not price competitive. Until we resolve this, we will continue to be caught between a rock and a hard place. One solve is policy based, the second is investing in more renewable energy capacity, quickly. A short footnote here – in the UK domestic gas and electricity prices have a spark gap of x3.2, so a heat pump needs to have a COP of more than 3.2 for it to be cheaper. Jersey is showing how impactful policy change can be by pricing gas at 18p per kWh and electricity at 12p per kWh, which means a heat pump is nearly six times cheaper to run than a condensing gas boiler. An expert contact of mine reckons that as a result of this “gas will be gone from Jersey in the blink of an eye”.
5. Once public awareness for the benefits of heat pumps rises, which I am confident it will, we will require more qualified installers to avoid delays, ensure installs meet quality standards, and provide aftercare. Here we need to make the case for high skilled green jobs, or to be more frank about it, replacements for boiler engineers. But a better supply side is not enough.
6. Households need a guide to accompany them through the home energy transition. Whatever this product or service ends up looking like it should allow consumers to track and measure their positive environmental impact. Even if we claim not to, we like to tell others that our actions are doing something good for the planet. So why not heat pump brag about it.
P.S. Having just read so much about hydrogen, you might be curious to know what the eight colours of the hydrogen rainbow 🌈 are and how their environmental credentials compare. So here they are, all you need to do is match the descriptions to the colours :-P
Grey : the most common and the cheapest form of hydrogen production that combines methane and water vapour through a process called “steam reforming.” In the process, waste carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere.
Blue : like its grey cousin it is extracted using steam reforming, but the carbon emissions released in the process are captured and stored, which reduces emissions but doesn’t completely eliminate them. It is being marketed as “clean hydrogen” or “low carbon hydrogen” but Friends of the Earth describe it as “Big Oil’s next greenwashing scam”. A recent study by Cornell University found that “[Although] industry claims to have the technology to capture 80–90% of CO2, in reality, it’s closer to 12%”. So, perhaps “marginally cleaner than grey hydrogen” would be a more accurate description.
White : is a naturally occurring geological form of hydrogen found in bedrock and can be extracted as a by-product of fracking. Not much is known about it, so a better name for it might be “mysterious hydrogen”.
Pink : extracted via electrolysis powered by nuclear energy. I’d never thought of nuclear as a pink type of energy, but let’s go with it.
Yellow : extracted via electrolysis powered by solar energy. One senses that the sunshine brigade felt “green hydrogen” was too broad a definition and that they deserved their own colour. Alas, it seems even energy is succumbing to identity politics.
Green : extracted via electrolysis powered by renewable energy (wind and solar). Although in this instance mixing yellow and blue doesn’t make it green.
Brown :really, really bad hydrogen made via gasification from coal.
