Burning hydrogen to launder oil and gas
John Swinney throws his support behind a scheme that is a bad way to heat homes and a bad way to use a precious hydrogen resource - evidently showing his capture by the oil and gas lobby.
Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
The big energy story from Scotland this week is John Swinney arguing with Westminster not for the devolution of the power to launch a national public energy company in Scotland but instead arguing for Westminster to not regulate ahead of a pilot scheme in Fife to convert homes that burn natural gas for heat, hot water and cooking into burning hydrogen instead.
You might, on the surface of things, think that this is a good thing – a welcome transition away from emitting carbon. The problem is that in this case it does the very opposite and is a bitter waste of what could be an innovative resource.
Unlike fossil fuels, hydrogen isn’t really an extractable resource (it is a bit – mostly as a byproduct of fossil fuels though and the largest known deposit so far would only cover current global demand for a couple of years) so it has to be generated by other means. The cleanest and greenest method is “Green Hydrogen” where water is split into hydrogen and oxygen using renewable electricity.
While this should be the main form of hydrogen generation of the future, the largest production method at the moment is “Grey hydrogen”. This is formed by combining methane – the key component of natural gas – with water to create hydrogen and carbon dioxide (Other “colours” of hydrogen production exist such as “black” hydrogen which is similar to “grey” but uses coal instead of natural gas and “pink” hydrogen which uses the electricity from a nuclear reactor to split water into hydrogen).
“Grey” hydrogen is what happens when the CO2 generated after splitting and recombining the methane is just released into the atmosphere – because of the extra processing steps involved and the increased chance of methane leaks throughout the process, “grey” hydrogen has a higher carbon footprint than just burning the methane. However, if the production facility employs carbon capture and storage (CCS), then the hydrogen is instead termed “Blue Hydrogen” - or what the Scottish Government calls “low carbon hydrogen”.
In theory, there are advantages to piping hydrogen to homes to be burned instead of piping methane to home gas boilers. It would be rather more technically challenging to install a carbon capture device on every home boiler in the country than it would be to install one at the blue hydrogen generation station. With the same logic, an electric car charged by a coal power plant could, in theory, be cleaner than a petrol car if a CCS scheme could capture the emissions from the coal plant.
The problem with that logic is that CCS doesn’t work. Scheme after scheme has failed to meet its technical goals. At least one failed to capture enough carbon to offset its own operations, never mind anyone else’s, and therefore ended up doing more damage to the planet than if it simply hadn’t been built.
Even if it can work on a technical level, the challenges of storing the carbon are immense – the UK’s expected storage capacity is only large enough for a few years of current emissions and a couple of decades of “Net Zero”. Globally, CCS storage capacity appears to have been overestimated by up to an order of magnitude – if you thought that salt mine could store ten years worth of emissions, it looks like it might only be able to store emissions for one year.
“ If we lay out all of the possible uses for hydrogen, their most likely competitor (e.g. electricity, biogas etc) and the actual economic case for hydrogen against that alternative we find that burning it in the home sits just about bottom of the ladder of priorities.”
Hydrogen is going to be a very valuable resource in the Green Economy as it can act to displace fossil fuels from areas that can’t easily be electrified. Homes aren’t high on that list. Modern heat pumps and district heat networks can provide heat to homes far more efficiently than hydrogen can and there are almost no circumstances where piping hydrogen to a home to be burned will be cheaper than wiring electricity to that home to power a heat pump or an induction heating element.
Where hydrogen might have a use in energy transmission, it’s likely to be in storage for those rare few days in a year when it is neither windy enough for turbines nor bright enough for solar (PV or thermal). Even then, batteries are pushing that space narrower by the day. The same goes for transport.
When we wrote our Green New Deal blueprint in 2019, it looked like ground transport technology would be split between “batteries for cars vans and” and “hydrogen for buses and trucks”. That argument has essentially now been closed, with battery EVs showing their supremacy over hydrogen for all but niche cargoes and the very longest distance truck journeys (and even those will only make sense for trips that go to places where trains don’t or can’t).
Ocean shipping and air transit are still unsolved problems and may still show a place for hydrogen (particularly the latter, though they will both compete with biofuels or maybe ammonia) but the real high-value use for green hydrogen will be the decarbonisation of the NON-fuel uses for hydrocarbons – like replacing coke for steel production or methane for chemical feedstocks.
If we lay out all of the possible uses for hydrogen, their most likely competitor (e.g. electricity, biogas etc) and the actual economic case for hydrogen against that alternative we find that burning it in the home sits just about bottom of the ladder of priorities.
So why is Swinney defending it? It’s simple. He’s been successfully lobbied by an oil and gas sector that needs to create a market for carbon capture and storage and the best way to do it cheaply, is to burn hydrogen inefficiently while winning “green” points for doing so.
Let’s wind this argument back a bit. We’re here conducting this pilot not as a demonstration of the Green Hydrogen economy but as a demonstration of the Blue Hydrogen economy. The purpose of Blue Hydrogen is to prop up the case for Carbon Capture and Storage. The case for CCS is being made because that allows fossil fuel companies to keep extracting and selling fossil fuels in a world where it’s now a little less politically acceptable for them to dump their pollution into the Global Commons.
The hydrogen is thus a mechanism for laundering the reputation of fossil fuel companies and allows them to keep making their profits off the back of our fuel poverty while dumping their “waste” onto us in a different form than they did before.
A much better approach to transforming our homes for the green economy would start not with the fossil fuel companies and what they want but by coming to the other side and looking at homes first. We’d be designing and retrofitting homes to minimise their total energy needs.
We’d be using the new and lowered estimates of energy demand to build out energy grids appropriately – including by installing district heat pipes to deliver heat efficiently and minimising the number of pylons required to move electricity to power heat pumps.
We’d be building our hydrogen economy to maximise the efficient uses of green hydrogen – looking especially at chemical feedstocks, steel production and energy storage. And after we’ve done all of that we’d then turn to the fossil fuel industry and ask them what they can produce that we still need.
It turns out, that if you follow our Common Home Plan, the answer is “not much”. There’s a reason why I’ve claimed before that the oil barons simply can’t survive a Green New Deal. They know this, which is why they’re fighting tooth and nail to prevent one from happening – even if it means installing hydrogen boilers in homes in Fife.
