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Hydrogen Poised to Play Key Role in U.K. Heating and Transport

Hydrogen Poised to Play Key Role in U.K. Heating and Transport

(Bloomberg) -- Using hydrogen to heat homes and power vehicles will play a vital part in Britain’s efforts to meet stringent climate targets and can’t be dismissed as an expensive pipe dream.

That’s the conclusion of National Grid Plc’s network service operator in its annual Future Energy Scenarios outlook. It anticipates 11 million homes will be heated by hydrogen by 2050, which is half of the number currently using natural gas.

To get to a world that limits global warming to acceptable levels, hydrogen will be in widespread use across heat, transport and industrial processes, National Grid ESO said in the report. Policy makers should act immediately to maintain hope of hitting the government’s net-zero carbon emissions target by 2050, the network operator said, urging measures on a “significantly greater scale” than it had suggested a year ago.

Hydrogen Poised to Play Key Role in U.K. Heating and Transport

The space given over to hydrogen use in National Grid ESO’s report shows the growing acceptance that a way needs to be found to deploy the gas at scale to decarbonize the most polluting sectors in the U.K. The technology is currently limited to several small-scale projects testing hydrogen’s use across different applications with the aim of having something commercially viable by the late 2020s.

Hydrogen Poised to Play Key Role in U.K. Heating and Transport

Currently the U.K. produces about 700,000 tons of hydrogen a year, the equivalent of 27 terawatt-hours of electricity. By 2050, more than 300 terawatt-hours of electricity will need to come from hydrogen.

The majority of the hydrogen created is by heating natural gas with steam at a high temperature which produces a synthetic fuel in a process known as methane reforming; the waste carbon dioxide is then sequestered by carbon capture technology. By mid-century, 90% of the gas produced will come from methane reforming.

Read more on hydrogen’s potential in this analysis by BNEF

“Whilst gas will have an important role to play, a clear plan for the decarbonization of heat is needed,” Kayte O’Neill, head of strategy and regulation at National Grid ESO.

Homes too will need to become more efficient and with the right heating systems in place, including electric and hybrid heat pumps, more energy efficient dwellings could use up to 26% less energy than today.

“It’s our ambition to be able to operate a net zero electricity system by 2025 and the fundamental changes outlined in this report make it more important than ever to take a whole system view to ensure we have a coordinated approach to decarbonizing the whole energy sector,” O’Neill said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jeremy Hodges in London at jhodges17@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.net, Andrew Reierson

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