By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Magness

Its that Pushmi-Pullyu again!!

First we’re having hydrogen:

Then five days later we’re not!

But taxpayers have still got to pay for hydrogen factories:

Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho is to approve plans for hydrogen factories around UK coasts as part of the drive to achieve net zero.

Ms Coutinho is to publish a “Hydrogen Roadmap” within days, setting out how Britain will produce and use the gas in industrial quantities.

Hydrogen offers a clean alternative to natural gas and could potentially replace diesel as a key fuel for lorries, trains, and ships under net zero. It could also replace gas in heavy industry.

The roadmap is understood to include plans for large-scale hydrogen production facilities, seeding an entirely new UK energy industry and thousands of new jobs.

Teesside, Humberside and Merseyside are the most likely initial sites for mass hydrogen production because they already have much of the necessary infrastructure, say Whitehall insiders.

In the longer term, others would follow at sites potentially including Bacton in Norfolk, Milford Haven in south Wales and St Fergus in north east Scotland.

Those sites would be linked to each other and to the gas network by a “hydrogen grid” – a network of pipes dedicated to moving hydrogen around the UK as already happens with natural gas.

The scheme will cost billions of pounds, much of which will initially come from government subsidies and grants aimed at kickstarting the industry. Costs will ultimately fall on taxpayers and consumers.

Ms Coutinho is also expected to set out controversial longer-term plans for replacing natural gas with pure hydrogen for home heating. This would mean replacing or upgrading boilers, cookers and gas fires in all affected homes.

However, this will not go ahead until the idea has been trialled, first at village scale and then in whole towns to assess public acceptance and safety.

The move to hydrogen will be expensive. Hydrogen is produced either from natural gas, with the waste CO2 buried in rocks deep beneath the seabed, or by using electricity to break down water molecules. Both methods need a lot of energy, which makes them costly.

The Government’s own Hydrogen Strategy warns: “Although costs are likely to reduce significantly and rapidly as innovation and deployment accelerate, hydrogen is currently much more costly to produce and use than existing fossil fuels.”

A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesman said the UK wanted to become a global leader in producing and using low carbon hydrogen. This would include trialling the gas for domestic heating but only in communities that supported the idea.

The spokesman said: “By 2030, we aim to deliver 10 gigawatts of low carbon hydrogen production capacity, including at least half from green hydrogen sources, supporting more than 12,000 jobs and up to £11bn of private investment across the UK.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/12/13/claire-coutinho-hydrogen-factories-britain-coast-net-zero/

Given that half of this 10 GW will be “green”, the other half will have to come from steam reforming gas, which is about 65% fuel efficient. In other words, you need about 50% more gas than if you burnt the gas in the first place instead.

Worse still, any Carbon Capture process will inevitably waste yet more gas, assuming you can even make it work. You will probably double your gas consumption going down the Steam Reforming/CCS route. It’s just as well COP28 has allowed the Arabs to carry on producing as much natural gas as they can sell!

But even the “green” hydrogen won’t be green at all, as it can only come from dispatchable sources , i.e.natural gas. This is because all of the wind/solar power will already be maxed out on the grid, even come 2030. There will be no surplus wind power to make hydrogen out of.

CCGTs are reckoned to run at about 60% efficiency, whilst electrolysers run at about 75%. In other words, after allowing for line losses, the through efficiency rate is about 40%. You therefore need 250 GWh of gas to produce 100 GWh of hydrogen.

So we are going to spend billions building these hydrogen factories, and in the process will need twice as much gas as we would have needed if we burnt the stuff in the first place!

Crackers!