By Paul Homewood
h/t Patsy Lacey
It appears the fruitloops really are in charge, as dozy Jillian Ambrose reports:
Ministers are expected to reignite plans for a £50bn hydrogen overhaul of the country’s gas grid to help strip harmful carbon emissions from the energy system.
Within weeks the Government will publish a long-delayed strategy to clean up emissions from the country’s heat, transport and industrial sectors in a multi-billion pound energy evolution as radical as the power sector’s move from fossil fuels to renewables.
The plan could usher in an ambitious move to convert the nation’s boilers to run on lower-carbon hydrogen rather than methane-rich natural gas.
Experts say this could slash carbon emissions from heating by more than 70pc at the lowest possible cost. But it would still require £50bn and add £170 to gas bills every year by 2050.
A report from KPMG found that converting the UK gas grid to use hydrogen could be £150bn to £200bn cheaper than rewiring British homes to use electric heating powered by lower-carbon sources.
Crucially, the consultants said hydrogen heating would be the least hassle for energy customers because very few appliances would need to be replaced. The existing gas grid would need only minor upgrades because it was originally designed for hydrogen, the report added.
Natural gas has been used to heat homes since the North Sea oil and gas heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But for 100 years before then the country ran on “town gas” which is mostly hydrogen with smaller quantities of carbon monoxide and methane.
A return to hydrogen heating is already being trialled by Northern Gas Networks which is working to transform Leeds to become a “hydrogen city” by the late 2020s.
But green groups have warned that waiting at least a decade for hydrogen heating is a high-risk option which could make meeting climate targets even more difficult.
The report is already over a year late. A government spokesman declined to comment on when the report will be published.
It is worth emphasising that even this horrifyingly expensive scheme is said to be £150bn to £200bn cheaper than rewiring British homes to use electric heating powered by lower-carbon sources. This should be frightening in itself.
But let’s go back to basics.
Jillian Ambrose claims that it will cost £50bn and add £170 to annual household gas bills. However, this is not the whole story.
As the Telegraph reported last year, the Leeds pilot trial would cost £2bn, which based on 320,000 households equates to £6250 each. Therefore applied to the country as a whole, we would be looking at a total capital cost of £144bn. (This assumes 4 million homes without access to the gas grid).
So why the big discrepancy? Simply that the £50bn only covers the cost of converting 17 cities by 2050. Two thirds of the country won’t be converted, and will either have to carry on using natural gas, or electrify.
As for the extra annual running cost, the Telegraph also told us last year that the Leeds pilot would add £139 million of annual running costs. This equates to £434 per household.
The lower figure of £170 again arises because only a third of the country is to be converted. Even this equates to £4bn a year.
These extra running costs arise because of the need to convert natural gas into hydrogen. For instance, it has been estimated that hydrogen produced by steam reformation costs approximately three times the cost of natural gas per unit of energy produced. The estimate is an old one, but the principle remains the same.
These huge and horrifying costs will therefore only save a third of domestic gas demand, which itself only accounts for 60% of total UK gas consumption.
The residential sector, including all fuels, only accounts for 16% of total UK CO2 emissions. And only about half of that comes from gas.
So we plan to spend billions to save a tiny fraction of our emissions.
In global terms, the UK consumes just 2% of the world’s total of gas.
And, of course, the steam reforming process still emits large amounts of CO2 anyway, both from the splitting of the methane, and from the energy needed to provide the heat for the process.
As Lord Oxburgh pointed out in his report to Parliament last year, “Lowest Cost Decarbonisation for the UK: The Critical Role of CCS”, with regard to hydrogen for heat:
All of this, even if feasible, will cost billions more.
In other words, we are expected to pay £50bn, plus an extra £4bn a year on our bills, just so that we can cut emissions of CO2 by, if we are lucky, 2%.
But even then green groups don’t think that is enough, and that waiting at least a decade for hydrogen heating is a high-risk option which could make meeting climate targets even more difficult.
It appears that they would much prefer the even more expensive option of total electrification.
The Telegraph says the government report is already over a year late. I am not surprised.
I highly suspect that the costings are so outrageous, and the sheer logistics so ridiculous, that nobody in the government wants to publish it. We can expect much watering down of the proposals, and tampering with the costings to make them slightly less disagreeable.
And then it will be wrapped up in hopelessly make believe assumptions that some new wonderful smart technology will come along to save us all eventually.
And then we will sail blindly on.
In other words, nothing will change.
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September 3, 2017 at 04:39PM
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