UK Government Set To Nominate Hydrogen Boom Towns

Gosh, some lucky residents are due to be chosen by our beneficent government as guinea pigs for the rollout of ‘safe and effective’ zero carbon hydrogen boilers. On the short[straw]list are Aberdeen, Scunthorpe, Redcar and Merseyside. Strangely, Windsor, Weybridge, Sevenoaks, Beaconsfield, Henley on Thames and Marlow didn’t make it. Of course I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that whereas the latter rank as the most affluent towns in England, those towns which have been shortlisted for the Green hydrogen boom are some of the least affluent, deprived, working class towns in Britain. I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that maybe the government thinks it can bribe these residents more easily with financial incentives or pull the wool more easily over their eyes as regards the ‘benefits’ of home hydrogen heating.

To make hydrogen boilers ‘safe’ all you need is a 4x4 inch hole in your wall sited somewhere near the boiler, to minimise the risk of an explosion should the extremely flammable and lightest and smallest chemical element in the known universe decide to sneak out from microscopic holes in the pipework running to the boiler or from the boiler itself. So best not to install it in the kitchen unless you want your cooking area to feel Baltic on very cold, blustery winter days.

The ‘effective’ argument is rather more complex and difficult to make. Given that hydrogen burns with zero emissions of carbon dioxide, it is effective in that it will not fry or boil, or incinerate the planet any time soon, according to the ‘settled science’ of man-made global warming. That much is certain (as long as you are a true believer in the Settled Science). What is far less certain is how effective hydrogen will be as a domestic heat source and fuel supply, practically and economically speaking. What is even more uncertain is how popular the rollout of the hydrogen boom will be with those largely poor, working class residents whose town will be chosen as the testing ground for this new Clean Green revolution in home heating. Because in July 2023, the residents of Whitby roundly rejected a similar scheme to heat their homes using hydrogen, causing the government to pretend to backtrack on the push for Green hydrogen. I say pretend because it obviously hasn’t given up on the notion of forcing homes to covert to hydrogen. Just like Sunak pretended to give consumers a choice re. electric vehicles and then back-tracked by forcing manufacturers to build electric vehicles, thereby effectively forcing consumers to buy them.

Hydrogen, despite being the most abundant element in the Universe, is nowhere to be found on planet earth. Gaia, in her wisdom, made sure there were plenty of planet destroying fossil fuels buried beneath land and sea, but curiously, no reserves of abundant ‘clean Green’ zero carbon hydrogen. Water (H2O) contains hydrogen as well as two oxygen atoms. Water is very abundant but sadly, the hydrogen it contains is chemically bound to two oxygen atoms which means, if you want to get to the hydrogen, you have to expend energy to release it from its strong bonds to the oxygen atoms. Thus, the provision of ‘Green’ hydrogen needs energy in to get energy out, and if it’s to be truly ‘Green’ this energy required to split water into its component atoms must come from windmills, which are great when the wind is blowing, but not so great when it’s not and even when the wind is blowing, any surplus must be used there and then. so water splitting factories producing ‘Green’ hydrogen must operate intermittently according to the weather. Not exactly the best model for industrial efficiency.

But let's assume it’s been a good day or a good month for the production of truly Green hydrogen, which can then be pumped through existing gas pipelines to homes and businesses to provide zero carbon heating in modified or custom built gas boilers. Apart from the bloody great big hole needed in the wall which might tend to compromise the usefulness of hydrogen as a domestic heating fuel, there are other considerations. The Telegraph says that “hydrogen’s value lies in having a high energy density, so it can power anything from homes to heavy vehicles.” But this is only half the story. It is true that, compared to methane, the energy density of hydrogen per kilogram is much higher: 143 megajoules versus 55 megajoules. However, hydrogen is a much lighter gas than methane, which we currently use to power our gas boilers. In fact it is the lightest element in the Universe, consisting of just one proton and one circling electron:

That means, to get one kilogram of hydrogen, you need a lot more atoms than you do stable molecules of methane. What this means in practice is that hydrogen is very much more difficult to store than methane because, for the same storage volume, containing the same mass, you are going to need to compress hydrogen a lot more than you need to compress the much heavier methane. Thus it turns out that, even though the mass energy density of hydrogen compares favourably to that of methane, the volumetric energy density does not, as you can see from this chart:

Hydrogen compressed to 700bar pressure stores 5.6 MJ of energy per litre. Natural gas (primarily methane) compressed to only 250 bar, contains more energy - 9MJ per litre. At ambient atmospheric pressure (just before it is ignited and burnt in your hydrogen boiler) hydrogen only contains 0.0107 MJ per litre, whereas pure methane contains 0.0378 MJ per litre - over 3 times as much useful energy, ready to be released as heat.

So in practice, natural gas (methane) is much easier to store, less flammable, less prone to leaking (because the molecules are much larger than the single hydrogen atoms) and more energy efficient, litre for litre, than ‘Green’ hydrogen. But because hydrogen is zero carbon and because the government has signed up to legally binding insane zero carbon targets, they are pushing this ‘Green’ alternative to natural gas on reluctant residents, starting with working class plebs in Humberside and eastern Scotland, plus Scousers on Merseyside, who they figure will be more of a pushover than rich southerners. I think they’re in for a shock.

Article Correction 12/12

h/t Mark Hodgson for finding this BBC article published just 9 hours ago. It appears that there are significant deposits of natural hydrogen, but they are generally smaller and more difficult and complex to exploit than oil and gas.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67541581