Cost and complexity hobble UK’s drive for low-carbon hydrogen
Source：financial times
Pilkington’s factory in the globally renowned glassmaking town of St Helens in north-west England needs a steady supply of fuel to keep its 1,500C furnaces burning day and night. “We cannot turn off the furnace,” said Chris Dye, a manager for renewable energy procurement at NSG Pilkington.
“It has to stay warm for a 15-year campaign.” The company, owned by Japan’s Nippon Sheet Glass, uses methane gas piped from the North Sea or shipped in from around the world to fuel its operations, but it eventually wants to move to a lower-carbon form of energy. It believes hydrogen is the most promising option given the high temperatures it can generate and the generous government subsidies that are expected to come with it. Making low-carbon hydrogen involves splitting it from natural gas and capturing the carbon dioxide released, known as “blue” hydrogen, or splitting it from water using green electricity to make “green” hydrogen.
But government plans to develop low-carbon hydrogen in Britain are falling behind schedule, due to the high costs involved and the complexity of co-ordinating several different industries.
The setbacks risk upsetting the decarbonisation plans of factories in the industrial region between Liverpool and north-west Wales.
The area’s geological strengths — such as salt caverns — make it potentially ideal for storing hydrogen, and its depleted oil wells can be used to store carbon dioxide. It is also well connected to factories that could become consumers.
Carmaker Jaguar Land Rover is one of the companies that want to move from natural gas to hydrogen at its Halewood plant in Merseyside.
“We have made really strong commitments to our shareholders [on cutting emissions],” said Neil Hewitt, JLR’s sustainability operations manager. “We have high-temperature processes and hydrogen works well for that.”
In 2022, the then Conservative government wanted as much as one gigawatt of low-carbon hydrogen production capacity to be up and running by the end of 2025, rising to 10GW by 2030, but this has failed to materialise.
The Labour government’s hydrogen strategy, due to be published last year, has been delayed until early this year as the ambitions of ministers confront strained public finances and pressure to bring down energy bills.