Proposed ‘Hydrogen Village’ which could see homes swap gas for hydrogen

You know a change has hit the real world when you see protest posters about it.

But ‘Say no to Hydrogen’ flyers plastered in suburban bay windows seem a little bizarre.

How can you be against an element, especially the most abundant one in the universe? When it’s being pushed on you and your much loved home.

At least that’s the perception of some residents in Whitby, a neighbourhood of Ellesmere Port in Cheshire, like Keith Lewington.

“I think it is an absolute disgrace, we’ve been offered up on a plate to the oil and gas industry,” he says.

The ‘Hydrogen Village’ proposal is for 2,000 homes here to be cut off from conventional gas and plumbed into hydrogen.

It’s being developed by British Gas, the pipeline company Cadent and the local council as a pilot project to assess the suitability of hydrogen as a domestic energy source.

Three-quarters of British homes are heated with gas but it is a hydro-carbon – chemical formula CH4 – a fuel that emits carbon dioxide when it is burnt, contributing to global warming.

New homes built after 2025 have to be natural gas free.

Hydrogen, on the other hand, is totally carbon-free, can flow in pipes and can be used in boilers and cookers. Its backers, like Mike Foster from the Energy and Utilities Alliance, see it as an ‘oven-ready’ replacement for gas.

He says: “There will be no real change for people who are currently used to using natural gas. Housing stock will be populated with what’s known as hydrogen-ready boilers that can use natural gas now and at the point of conversion can be converted in situ in someone’s home. And then they just are using hydrogen in the same way as they’re using natural gas“.

But hydrogen has flaws.

Making it in a climate-friendly way uses electrolysis to split it from water – H20. But this is hugely energy hungry. To replace natural gas with hydrogen in UK homes right now would need nearly 30 times all the offshore wind power currently around Britain.

A report out this week from the Climate Change Committee, the independent government advisers on hitting our climate goals, doesn’t rule out hydrogen for home heating but comes close. David Joffe is their head of Net zero.

“It only has a small role to play,” he says. “The overwhelming majority of our decarbonised heating by 2050 is going to be in electrified form because we simply won’t be able to produce enough low carbon hydrogen for it to have a major role in the building sector.”

Read the rest of the article about ProjectZero on Sky News here