A couple of years ago I set up a very makeshift little experiment in my back garden
to demonstrate the relatively straightforward process of producing hydrogen gas from water via
electrolysis. It wasn't the most mind-blowingly exciting demonstration of the concept to be
completely honest, but we did get a little pop at the end to prove that we had indeed liberated a
very small amount of the explosive gas. There was an awful lot of media hype around hydrogen at the
time and there still is today to be honest. Some of the more enthusiastic proponents are backing
hydrogen as a potentially major player in the race towards net zero. Australia's richest man,
Andrew Forrest, has set up a company called Fortescue Future Industries, which he says
will be making 15 million tons of green hydrogen per year by 2030 using the cheap and abundant
renewable power generation that's being rapidly rolled out in places like Western Australia.
And there are several revenue streams that Forrest believes he can tap into.
Hydrogen has the potential to be used as a fuel for large-scale transport like buses,
trains, trucks, ships and even planes. It can also be converted into ammonia which is far
safer and easier to transport and which can serve as a long-term energy storage medium.
About 180 million tons of ammonia is already produced globally today and about 80 percent
of that is used to make fertilizer for the world's vast agricultural industry.
So there's definitely some useful stuff that can be done with hydrogen. In fact the investment bank
Goldman Sachs estimates that green hydrogen will become a 12 trillion dollar industry by 2050. But
according to a leading energy expert called Jan Rosenow, one of the things we shouldn't be using
hydrogen for is replacing natural gas in domestic home heating systems. So why is that then?
Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think. Jan Rosenow is Director of European Programmes
at the Regulatory Assistance Project, which is a non-profit energy expert organisation working in
Europe, the U.S, China and India. They cover a range of topics from the design and regulation
of energy networks through to end products like building energy and transport electrification, and
they take a holistic systems approach to establish best overall solutions rather than looking at
single solutions in isolation. I caught up with Jan via Zoom recently to discuss his findings
and to understand more about the implications for the future of home heating. "The main reason why
using green hydrogen - I'm talking about green hydrogen here not not blue - for heating is
challenging is that it's terribly inefficient to do that. Because you convert electricity
into hydrogen and then hydrogen in to heat you lose a lot of , you know, electricity along the
way - energy along the way, in comparison to a heat pump. That's very important. So you need
five to six times more electricity compared to a heat pump when you use green hydrogen for heating
because of those efficiency losses." Jan spent the last two years combing through no fewer than 18
separate independent industry reports looking at the feasibility of hydrogen in domestic heating
systems. Now it'd be a pretty dull couple of minutes if I had to read out the title of every
single one of them, especially as some of them are in German, which is definitely not my forte,
but I'll leave a link to each of them in the YouTube comments section below this video.
Every one of them pretty much rules out hydrogen as a major source of heating in buildings.
The IEA projects that hydrogen would account for less than two percent of building decarbonization
by 2050. The IPCC's climate mitigation report shows pretty much zero hydrogen in its future
space heating scenarios. Mckinsey came to a very similar conclusion in their
2050 projections for space heating, and market analyst Michael Liebrich offers what he describes
as the Clean Hydrogen Ladder, showing all of the possible uses of hydrogen ranging
from uncompetitive on the bottom rung all the way up to unavoidable
on the top step. On this scale hydrogen for domestic heating only makes it to run number two.
You could use so-called blue hydrogen instead. That's hydrogen derived by bombarding fossil gas
with high pressure steam until it relinquishes its hydrogen content. The process also produces
vast quantities of carbon dioxide which would have to be captured and buried somewhere permanently,
like under the North Sea for example, which is a project currently under development today.
But according to analysis by another industry expert, Mark Jacobson,
deriving hydrogen this way uses more methane per unit of heat than simply burning the gas
in the first place, so it's hardly a low carbon option. And if you want to know more detail about
that study, I made a video all about it last year which you can jump back to by clicking up there.
Here in the UK about 1.7 million old gas boilers are swapped out for new units every year. The
existing heating industry argues that if they were all replaced with hydrogen-ready boilers at more
or less the same cost as a gas boiler then in 10 years time we'd have 17 million homes ready
to receive hydrogen gas, which is about two thirds of the total housing stock in the UK.
Hydrogen ready boilers are gas boilers. There's effectively no difference . If you buy a hydrogen
ready boiler today it'll be set up to run on fossil methane gas. In future, in theory,
they could be converted to accommodate hydrogen gas by swapping out two or three small components.
For boiler manufacturers, moving to mass production of other technologies, like air
source heat pumps for example, would be disruptive and expensive, so naturally those companies are
strong advocates of hydrogen for home heating. The research papers highlighted several obstacles
to this idea though. The pipe work in many homes is now extremely old and already quite
leaky. Hydrogen is a very small molecule. In fact it's the smallest and simplest molecule in nature
and it's notorious for its ability to escape from containment vessels. It also has the tendency to
embrittle metal containment walls, making pipe work and joints more prone to failure with
the consequent safety issues that this brings, especially when using a gas that's significantly
more explosive than methane. And it's not quite as simple as switching straight from fossil gas
to hydrogen in the main gas grid either... "um and there's there's a cost also to converting the
gas grid. It's not, it's not, it's not ready for hydrogen. I mean the gas net operators will say
that a large part of the gas grid now is ready because it has been retrofitted over the years,
but there's still a huge cost. I think there's a study by Element Energy suggesting,
I think it's, 22 billion pounds or something as the cost of upgrading the gas grid. So there,
you know, there's still issues, even if we ignore the cost. There's still work that needs to be done
to even technically make this this possible." In fact all the reports that Jan Rosenow looked
at found that it would be vastly more expensive in the long run to implement green hydrogen for
home heating than it would be to install heat pumps at scale. European countries like Sweden,
Germany and the Netherlands also have very strong lobby groups who have vested interests
in maintaining the production of gas, or at least retaining the valuable pipeline network
that's already in place for gas delivery, but despite that pressure governments in those
countries understand the overall cost benefits of heat pumps and, in general, they're focused far
more on that technology for home heating than they are on hydrogen. There is no zero cost option for
decarbonization though. Accommodating millions of heat pumps would obviously require costly upgrades
to electricity grids, but in relative terms on the macro level all the analysis that Jan Rosenow and
his team looked at finds that it would be far costlier to build out five or six times more
renewable power to compensate for the inefficiency of hydrogen production than it would be to upgrade
the grid for heat pumps, which can deliver between three and five units of heat for every
unit of electricity. I've got an air source heat pump providing heating and hot water for my 100
year old three-bedroom terrace style house with three adult occupants and it works beautifully.
And, contrary to some of the scare stories you might have read or watched in the media,
I didn't have to rip out all my radiators and pipe work or install costly underfloor heating.
I changed one radiator and moved my fridge to make way for a water cylinder in a cupboard in
the kitchen and that was it. But heat pumps are not cheap to buy in the first place,
there's no denying that. Government funding for heat pumps via tax incentives, grants and loans
will be an important factor in how well they're rolled out, as Jan Rosenow explained...
"Denmark, for example, Sweden, The Netherlands, all countries that have changed the way how they
allocate taxes and levies on energy prices that customers face to make heat pumps more attractive,
even after you take into account the upfront cost, so it's just a more economic decision to
make over the lifetime of the appliance to go for the heat pump. In the UK it's the opposite.
You know we've we've actually built in incentives that discourage investment in heat pumps. And the
subsidy that would, is needed, to really you know, make a difference needs to be fairly significant."
One of the UK's leading energy providers, Octopus Energy, has recognized this shortcoming
in UK government policy and now provides its own incentive to new customers, offering heat pumps
for most suitable UK homes at a fully installed cost of between three and four thousand pounds
after the government grant of five thousand pounds has been awarded. That's starting to get pretty
close to the price you pay to fully replace a gas combi boiler. Jan Rosenow and his team calculated
that by 2030 it would cost the UK government only about three billion pounds a year to provide a
hundred percent grant for all low-income households to be fitted with a heat pump,
enabling the UK to meet the decarbonisation goals set out by the Climate Change Committee.
In turn that incentive would then drive volume into the industry, which of course would then
bring the cost of heat pumps right down, at which point the government subsidy could be phased out.
The Inflation Reduction Act that passed through the U.S Senate in August 2022
includes the provision of nine billion dollars in total energy rebates for American households,
including up to eight thousand dollars for the installation of heat pumps
that can heat and cool homes plus a seventeen hundred and fifty dollar rebate for a heat pump
water heater and up to four thousand dollars to upgrade the main electrical fuse board.
Jamal Lewis from the organization Rewiring America, said "a household with an efficient
electric heat pump for space heating and cooling, a heat pump water heater, one electric vehicle
and solar panels would save eighteen hundred dollars a year." There are other electric
solutions to look at as well, like this thermal mass storage unit called the ZEB
or Zero Emissions Boiler from a company called Tepeo, which may be a great solution for homes
that have a limited amount of space and can't accommodate a full heat pump installation. It's
about the size of an undercounter fridge. The ZEB can be charged up using cheap off-peak electricity
during the night and discharged during the day to provide heating and hot water for the home.
Of course the real elephant in the room is the fact that our governments should really
be spending big money to upgrade existing housing stock so that homes are properly insulated in the
first place. Right now in the UK many developers are still building new homes with very poor
insulation and energy efficiency and in most cases they're still installing gas combi boilers too.
Those developers know perfectly well that those homes will eventually have to be retrofitted at
a much higher cost to the householder. How we heat our homes in the future is arguably one of
the most contentious issues of the entire green transition debate. It's impossible to cover every
angle in a short video like this so, no doubt, there'll be points I've missed that you feel
should be aired. If you do, as always the place to do that is the comments section below. That's
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