Coutinho to approve plans for hydrogen factories on Britain’s coast

Claire Coutinho is preparing to publish a roadmap setting out how Britain will produce and use the gas in industrial quantities – OLI SCARFF/AFP

Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho is to approve plans for hydrogen factories around UK coasts as part of the drive to achieve net zero.

Ms Coutinho is to publish a “Hydrogen Roadmap” within days, setting out how Britain will produce and use the gas in industrial quantities.

Hydrogen offers a clean alternative to natural gas and could potentially replace diesel as a key fuel for lorries, trains, and ships under net zero. It could also replace gas in heavy industry.

The roadmap is understood to include plans for large-scale hydrogen production facilities, seeding an entirely new UK energy industry and thousands of new jobs.

Teesside, Humberside and Merseyside are the most likely initial sites for mass hydrogen production because they already have much of the necessary infrastructure, say Whitehall insiders.

In the longer term, others would follow at sites potentially including Bacton in Norfolk, Milford Haven in south Wales and St Fergus in north east Scotland.

Those sites would be linked to each other and to the gas network by a “hydrogen grid” – a network of pipes dedicated to moving hydrogen around the UK as already happens with natural gas.

The scheme will cost billions of pounds, much of which will initially come from government subsidies and grants aimed at kickstarting the industry. Costs will ultimately fall on taxpayers and consumers.

Hydrogen could also be blended into the UK’s domestic gas networks in concentrations of up to 20pc, creating a growing market for the gas and helping industry build experience in managing it.

Ms Coutinho is also expected to set out controversial longer-term plans for replacing natural gas with pure hydrogen for home heating. This would mean replacing or upgrading boilers, cookers and gas fires in all affected homes.

However, this will not go ahead until the idea has been trialled, first at village scale and then in whole towns to assess public acceptance and safety.

Plans to trial hydrogen home heating in Whitby, Cheshire, were abandoned earlier this year after local opposition.

Civil servants in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero are drawing up plans for village scale trials planned in the Scottish east coast community of Buckhaven and Dunbeath. A second larger one is planned in Redcar, near Teesside.

If that succeeds then an entire town could be converted to hydrogen with candidates so far including Aberdeen, Scunthorpe and villages around the Fawley oil refinery near Southampton.

Plans for the large-scale adoption of hydrogen are being drawn up to help the country move away from oil and gas, which provide 77pc of the nation’s total energy needs but produce CO2 emissions and leave the nation reliant on other nations for energy.

The move to hydrogen will be expensive. Hydrogen is produced either from natural gas, with the waste CO2 buried in rocks deep beneath the seabed, or by using electricity to break down water molecules. Both methods need a lot of energy, which makes them costly.

The Government’s own Hydrogen Strategy warns: “Although costs are likely to reduce significantly and rapidly as innovation and deployment accelerate, hydrogen is currently much more costly to produce and use than existing fossil fuels.”

Hydrogen’s value lies in having a high energy density, so it can power anything from homes to heavy vehicles.

It is also “clean”, meaning it produces no CO2 when burnt. Gas boilers running on methane, by contrast, account for 22pc of UK greenhouse gas emissions.

There is broad support for using hydrogen to fuel heavy vehicles such as lorries and trains, or in heavy industry. However, its use in homes is controversial after a recent National Infrastructure Assessment suggested that hydrogen is inefficient for domestic settings.

A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesman said the UK wanted to become a global leader in producing and using low carbon hydrogen. This would include trialling the gas for domestic heating but only in communities that supported the idea.

The spokesman said: “By 2030, we aim to deliver 10 gigawatts of low carbon hydrogen production capacity, including at least half from green hydrogen sources, supporting more than 12,000 jobs and up to £11bn of private investment across the UK.

“The hydrogen production road map will set out how we expect the hydrogen industry to evolve to 2035.”

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