Hydrogen, Coming Soon to a Boiler Near You

Over the next 30 years, a vast change may take place beneath your feet. And the most amazing part? If you don’t hear about this now, you might not know at all until it’s already happened.

To meet the 2050 Climate Change Act targets, the UK has already undergone some significant improvements. To reduce carbon emissions by 80% of 1990 levels, coal has been all but phased out and oil is singing its swan song.

In our efforts to do this, however, Natural Gas took much of the slack. Overall, it reduced CO2 emissions, but in its place it left a new addiction. Phasing this reliance out is the next step, and is surprisingly even simpler.

Natural Gas
While it’s true that natural gas emits less CO2 than other fossil fuels, it now stands in the awkward position of being the prime culprit in total CO2 emissions.

Extracted from pockets underground, natural gas finds its way to our cookers and boilers and awesome national-scale energy generation plants. Today, 40% of all electric generation comes from the burning of natural gas. And 30% of all carbon emissions in the UK comes from heating alone.

But we can’t simply do away with it. While 30% of all carbon emissions come from heating systems, 85% of homes are heated by gas.

Gas is a drug that would prove fatal if we go cold turkey. The solution then is to find a healthy alternative.

Hydrogen
One of the most fundamental elements in the universe, and by far the most common. We consume it every day in the food we eat and the water we drink. We see its power every day overhead, coursing through our Sun.

In an oxygen rich atmosphere, like the one we enjoy on Earth, it’s highly flammable. The first benefit is that instead of spewing out residue carbon, the chemical reaction bonds hydrogen to oxygen, producing heat and H2O – water! It physically can’t produce CO2 because it simply doesn’t carry carbon.

While no broad scale deployment of hydrogen-based heating systems currently exist, the technology certainly does. It has proven application in closed industrial systems. In fact, it’s already used to separate crude oil!

Fundamentally, using hydrogen in place of natural gas is nearly an identical process. We’re just burning stuff, after all. Just a few key differences exist that we’ll cover later.

This is the core of the proposal: Hydrogen can replace Natural Gas.

Where Does it Come From?
Being so abundant, finding Hydrogen is never a problem. The tricky part is that it’s never found alone. It’s bound within other chemicals that it first needs to be separated from.

The ideal source is water. And the process – electrolysis – is so simple that you could do it at home for nearly no cost (although I’m obliged to give you the stunt man’s “Do Not Try This At Home” warning). However, on a national scale, it’s incredibly expensive. If this proposal hinged on water-sourced Hydrogen from the outset, it would fall at the first hurdle. Not only would we have to prematurely put prototype technology into practice – we’d have to build a lot of it.

Thankfully, we already have several plants that extract it from a much easier source: natural gas!

Many environmentalists are against this aspect of the proposal since it still relies on fossil fuels. But it’s integral for turning this gas-pipe dream into reality, as we’ll cover shortly.

In essence, this system would ‘pre-burn out’ the carbon from natural gas to contain it in one place, instead of dispersing it around our homes.

How Will it Go?
To meet the 2050 targets, this project will be ongoing for the next 30 years intensively. Which is remarkably ambitious – the much simpler (and much less vital) digital switch over took 5 years to complete.

The first consideration is how Hydrogen will be transported. Unfortunately, the existing national gas main pipe lines are almost entirely metallic. On metal, Hydrogen can have a highly corrosive effect. Fortunately and coincidentally, a full replacement of the pipeline is already underway, steadily upgrading outdated piping to a more durable Polyethylene alternative. Hydrogen will travel just as well as natural gas through this newly updated network.

The next consideration is at the business-end. It’s all very well to move Hydrogen around, but can we use it? Current boilers aren’t equipped to handle neat Hydrogen as a fuel source. So this might at first seem like we have to replace every boiler immediately. Not so. Boilers are replaced around every 10 to 15 years, so by the time hydrogen is in the pipes, not a single boiler currently in operation still would be. This is where ‘Hydrogen-ready’ boilers come in. Similar in principle to ‘HD-Ready TVs’, they would be capable of using both natural gas and Hydrogen, all prepared for the eventual switch over for a seamless transition.

The third and final major consideration is how this transition will roll out. The proposal itself is supported by an amazing report by Northern Gas Network, analysing the feasibility of a Hydrogen system in Leeds (accounting for 1% of the population). It is favourable in almost every aspect, including a significant amount of required infrastructure already in place. Leeds might be the ‘pilot conversion’ – the focal point of development to get a working system in place. Once the results are back from that development, it’s likely that the next most ideal location will be selected for a similar but improved upgrade procedure.

What Else Would This Unlock?
The benefits of this proposal – if/when it’s completely implemented nation-wide – don’t stop there. It would set in motion the next 50 to 100 years of future development.

With a gas network fully reliant on Hydrogen, the next step would be to finally kick our reliance on natural gas altogether. With such a significant market demand, supply would naturally move in to make the most of it (early adopters are already working on cleaner & more efficient Hydrogen extraction). Water-based extraction would continue to decline in cost until it’s cheaper overall – at which point Natural Gas becomes as obsolete as a coal-fired steam locomotive; the last fossil fuel finally extinguished.

With a substantial Hydrogen supply chain, surplus is guaranteed, which leaves even more development opportunities open. For example, as transport fuel cells – especially for heavy logistics like lorries and vans (technological advancements we already have, but struggle to maximise due to low Hydrogen supply). Not to mention the countless niche engineering opportunities that go unheard of, simply due to a lack of resources.

Overall, the evidence suggests that while the time frame is ambitious, the steps required to replace Natural Gas with Hydrogen form a natural progression with no extreme or painful revolutions along the way. Unless an even greater alternative than Hydrogen is found, it’s only a matter of time.