© ollomy, istockphoto.com

25 years ago, I took a job running the Clean Environment Management Centre (CLEMANCE) at the University of Teesside. Teesside was once home to a pair of massive ICI petrochemical factories founded in 1949, but as ICI started to fragment in the 1990s, ownership of the facilities splintered and individual plants started to close, with closure accelerating in the early 2000s as I arrived. The crippling deprivation in the area was most viscerally communicated by the desperately unhealthy-looking, scantily clad women hanging about street corners as I drove out of Middlesbrough each evening.

The big idea to reverse Teesside’s industrial decline and bring back its boom-time prosperity was the ‘hydrogen economy’. The standard presentation showed how the process industries on Teesside had all the knowledge, skills and facilities needed to manufacture, store and distribute hydrogen. The plan was to put demonstration projects in place along the length of the river Tees – from a scout hut near its source to the information sign on the iconic Transporter Bridge.

Hydrogen wasn’t our thing at CLEMANCE, but I wanted to be informed and stay in the loop, so I purchased a hydrogen-powered toy car which we could use on our stall during some of our many appearances at networking events. The kit included a solar panel and electrolyser to produce the hydrogen, and the car had a fuel cell to convert the hydrogen back into electricity to power an electric motor. We had fun watching the hydrogen bubble into the tank on our office window sill, and then letting the car loose across the floor.

However, the educational resources that came with the car were brutally honest in a way all those slick presentations on the potential for a hydrogen economy in the region weren’t. The notes told us that half the energy collected by the solar panel was lost in the electrolyser, and, furthermore, half the energy stored in the hydrogen was lost in the fuel cell. Four units of electricity in for every unit out. My jaw dropped – why not use a battery and lose 10-20% of the input energy rather than 75%?

About 10 years ago, I saw the same hydrogen economy presentation being given at a Teesside event. It was crystal clear nothing substantial had  developed in the intervening years – the pitch was the same, the theoretical examples were the same, no case studies of successful projects. And, as far as I am aware, nothing has developed since – it is clear that no-one can make the financial sums add up given that basic thermodynamic problem posed by the chemistry. Clean energy commentator Michael Liebreich has put numbers on this in his “hydrogen ladder” which shows that for almost every hydrogen use case, there is a cheaper alternative.

But hydrogen has a weird hold on the politics of the energy transition as it is seen as a lifeline by all those flogging molecules rather than electrons. A couple of weeks ago, that well known prestigious energy journal The Sun ran the headline “Ed Miliband sparks fears of ‘boiler ban by backdoor’ as he prepares to shun gas for heating homes” with the following assessment:

“the only viable path to retaining boilers would be to replace gas with eco-friendly alternatives like hydrogen or biomethane. These greener gasses could flow seamlessly through existing pipelines and work perfectly with boilers, enabling millions across the nation to continue living as they do now. Yet Red Ed is expected to snub these options in favour of encouraging households to adopt pricey heat pumps.”

This refers to analysis by the advisory Climate Change Committee pointing out, as Liebreich does, that heating your home with hydrogen would be extraordinarily expensive. The Sun says heat pumps are “pricey” and “more expensive to run than a gas boiler” – a fact that can only be true if you are burning natural gas. Funnily enough the cost of hydrogen isn’t mentioned, and the only quotes in the article come from the gas industry, which will of course benefit in the meantime. Anybody would have thought there’s a rearguard action from vested interests going on…

There are reports that No 10 wants ‘bulletproof’ arguments against hydrogen heating from Miliband before pulling the plug. “Too bloody expensive” would be the most obvious response. But still the grants for hydrogen research and development continue, and hydrogen continues to be cited as an opportunity to save the collapsing petrochemical industry around the UK. The question is for how long will the Government keep putting public money into trying to resuscitate a dead horse just for political expediency?