Let’s think beyond electric vehicles and a few battery plants: we need hydrogen

“Its time has come!” So proclaimed the headline of a recent article. Loyal optimist as ever, I thought it must be referring to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. In fact, it was talking about hydrogen.

Now hydrogen is not only the first and most basic element in the periodic table, it is also the most abundant element – with 90% of all the atoms in the universe being hydrogen atoms. It provides the fuel at the heart the nuclear explosions that power our entire solar system. Little surprise, then, that it is being touted as the next big thing to cut carbon emissions in energy and transport. What may be of more surprise is to realise that it may also be the salvation of our steel industry.

The government’s net zero strategy is not an ambitious document. But its aspiration for the supply of hydrogen is one of the more underwhelming, even in that over-bloated vacuity that passes for a strategy. It seeks to achieve just 5GW of low carbon hydrogen production capacity by 2030, which is less than 7% of our current capacity. The decision about whether to blend hydrogen into the gas network has been delayed until 2023, and even then it would only look to put 20% hydrogen into the mix.

Labour has been keen to talk about energy in the context of the cost of living crisis. But it has pained me to see our repeated failure to attack the structural subsidies received by the fossil fuel industry – even arguing to extend the VAT subsidy further! Our focus has been on the easily justified windfall tax on the oil and gas companies. That is a one-off. We should have focused on the structural 130% super-deductible that Rishi Sunak has given to business investment with no environmental filter. If a new oil field like Cambo were to go ahead, it would not be Siccar or Shell that paid for it, it would be you and me as taxpayers. And we would give them a 30% bonus on top for polluting our world even further.

We should be changing the tariff structure that sees the poorest families who consume least energy pay the highest unit price for it. It is simply wrong that a family struggling to keep the heating on is paying a higher price per therm than a wealthy home with a cinema and a swimming pool to heat. Energy is a precious commodity, not something to be given in an upmarket buy one, get one free BOGOF.

Labour has to think strategic and think structural. This means more than electric vehicles and a few battery plants. The batteries needed to power heavy machinery, such as a dump truck in a quarry, would be enormous and very heavy. Trucks and machinery tend to be in use every day, for a lot longer than cars, so the window of opportunity to recharge is very narrow. And besides, a dump truck in a quarry is in a very remote location, a long way from the grid, so it is not clear where the electricity would come from.

Ships, planes and trucks transport most of our products and supply the freight that accounts for more than 15% of global emissions. And beyond transport, we need a strategy for our heavy-emitting industries, steelmaking and cement. The answer here is not electric. Industry figures, nearly always mention the same word: hydrogen.

During a recent visit to Bury, our Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, spoke of the need for a thriving hydrogen industry at the heart of a global race for jobs. It formed and a key part of her proposed £28bn climate investment pledge.

Hydrogen has many advantages for large vehicles and heavy machinery. It is a gas that is very mobile – it can be transported easily to truck depots and motorway service areas or to quarries and building sites. Refuelling hydrogen-powered products takes minutes, not hours. Yet it has three times the energy density of diesel – to pull heavy loads on the road (trucks) or out of a quarry (dump trucks) – but without the CO2 emissions.

The technology to deploy hydrogen as a power source in vehicles or machinery already exists. It’s either a hydrogen fuel cell, which uses hydrogen to create the electric power to drive motors, or a hydrogen combustion engine. In August, Unite the union hailed as “groundbreaking” the announcement that Cummins in Darlington secured £14.6m to develop a hydrogen engine suitable to replace diesel engines used in the road haulage business, helping to protect the jobs of 640 workers.

Abundant as an element hydrogen may be, it is locked up in other forms and has to be manufactured. Green hydrogen production, using renewable electricity, is the best and cleanest way, though it is also more expensive and hardly registers yet as a full-scale production process. Other methods of production like blue hydrogen are more common, but they generate greenhouse gas emissions in their own right. We need a genuine and realistic strategy to ensure green hydrogen develops a cheaper and more sustainable production model. This is where a super tax deduction would make sense: to pump-prime an industry that can take green hydrogen forward at commercial scale.

Hydrogen fuel cells and hydrogen engines do not pump any carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They are entirely carbon neutral – only steam gets emitted. Vehicle and machinery manufacturers are already there with hydrogen technology, albeit at a small scale right now. If we get the right hydrogen production processes in place, making hydrogen at a globally competitive price, the British steel industry could use the fuel in blast furnaces in place of coking coal. Scandinavian steelmakers are already doing it. Maybe not so much “Its time has come!” and more like “It’s time to catch up!”.