Hydrogen to play niche role in home heating, says CCC

Hydrogen is likely to play a “niche” role in home heating, a Climate Change Committee (CCC) director has predicted.

The CCC’s recently appointed director of analysis James Richardson said hydrogen will play an important role in decarbonising heavy industry and shipping as well as providing back up power during prolonged periods when wind and solar farms are not generating electricity.

However home heating and heavy transport “look predominantly like niche areas” for hydrogen, Richardson said: “In heat there may be niche roles, supporting hybrid systems or whatever, but it looks like most of the answer is going to be electricity so probably less demand there.”

Richardson outlined the statutory climate change advisory body’s vision for the role that the low carbon gas will play in the future energy mix, during a panel session at consultancy Aurora’s annual hydrogen conference in London.

Noting that that the government has recently indicated that hydrogen will play a “minor role” in home heating, he said: “The evidence is stacking up that for most houses this country, a heat pump is the most cost effective solution and will work.

“There may be some niche roles. We’re not saying no (to hydrogen) but it doesn’t look like a big role.”

In its latest progress report on the UK’s emission reduction efforts, published during the summer, the CCC pointed towards a “focused” role for hydrogen in heating buildings.

Richardson also told delegates that while some parts of heavy transport look “very hard to electrify”, batteries are increasingly being used in this sector.

In the early stages of hydrogen’s development, Richardson said that bilateral agreements will be required between relatively few providers and offtakers, which will probably located in similar industrial clusters.

But as the industry develops, it will require storage and hydrogen transmission networks, albeit not as large as the current gas grid, he said: “If you want to deal with these variations in demand and supply, you want to connect up production with storage with use and you probably want to get the resilience benefits of connecting up multiple sites.”

Water supply also needs to be considered, given how it is required for the electrolysis process that is used to produce the lowest carbon ‘green’ hydrogen, Richardson said: “You don’t want to be putting a lot of electrolysers into places that are water stressed. That may mean that you need more pipes so that you can manufacture at a distance from where the water resource is stressed.”

Richardson said that the long lead in times for developing storage would also be an issue as it requires planning many years in advance, he said: “Those things don’t happen over night.”

Richardson was backed up by Catherine Raw, managing director of SSE Thermal.

Referring to the government’s timetable for developing a business model for transporting and storing hydrogen, she said: “If you wait until 2025 for the transport and storage business model, you’re then wasting another four plus years to get going because it takes that long.”

Large scale storage is essential to underpin the development of green hydrogen because it will enable electrolysers, which make up the biggest chunk of production costs, to be used most efficiently, she said: “You could run your electrolysers  efficiently and scale up your electrolysers and the storage acts as your buffer.

“The problem is you need to then invest in the storage and who pays. That’s the big gap.”

Paro Konar, director for hydrogen & industrial carbon capture at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, told the same event that “absolutely nothing” has changed on the government’s “ambition” for the sector.

There is a need to move on from the “black and white” heating debate between electrification and hydrogen, she said: “Really, the conversation shouldn’t be about either or. We’ve got technologies, which are already in place, and starting to be deployed. This is about the ‘and’, the role that hydrogen can play in addition to electrification.”