Britain launches plan to ramp up ‘low carbon’ hydrogen capacity

The U.K. government published a new strategy on hydrogen use Tuesday, saying the country’s hydrogen economy could potentially support up to 100,000 jobs and be worth as much as £13 billion ($17.88 billion) by the middle of the century.

In a foreword to the strategy, Kwasi Kwarteng, the U.K.’s business and energy secretary, said the government, working with industry, wanted 5 gigawatts of “low carbon hydrogen production capacity” by the year 2030, which would be used across the economy.

“This could produce hydrogen equivalent to the amount of gas consumed by over 3 million households in the UK each year,” Kwarteng said.

Explaining how it could be deployed in the years ahead, he added: “This new, low carbon hydrogen could help provide cleaner energy to power our economy and our everyday lives — from cookers to distilleries, film shoots to power plants, waste trucks to steel production, and 40 tonne diggers to the heat in our homes.”

While there is excitement about potential use cases for low carbon hydrogen, the government’s strategy also tempered expectations when it came to using it for heating, stating it expected demand “to be relatively low” by 2030.

The 5 GW target was previously included in the government’s 10-point plan for a so-called “green industrial revolution,” published last November.

In a statement accompanying the strategy’s publication, authorities said that by 2050, 20% to 35% of the U.K.’s energy consumption could be hydrogen-based. In the medium term, the U.K.’s hydrogen economy could unlock £4 billion of investment and support more than 9,000 jobs by the year 2030, the government said.

Alongside its Hydrogen Strategy, the U.K. government also published consultations related to low carbon hydrogen standards, a net zero hydrogen fund and a hydrogen business model.

One of the strategy’s key strands is to support what the government described as a “twin track” approach to different technologies, including “green” and “blue” hydrogen, with more details on production set to be released in 2022.

Described by the International Energy Agency as a “versatile energy carrier,” hydrogen can be produced in a number of ways.

One method includes using electrolysis, with an electric current splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen. If the electricity used in this process comes from a renewable source some call it green hydrogen, which is currently expensive to produce.

Blue hydrogen refers to hydrogen produced using natural gas — a fossil fuel — with the CO2 emissions generated during the process captured and stored. Recently, blue hydrogen has generated a significant amount of debate.

Just last week a study by researchers at Cornell and Stanford Universities, published in the peer-reviewed journal Energy Science & Engineering, said greenhouse gas emissions from blue hydrogen production were “quite high, particularly due to the release of fugitive…