UK cancels controversial hydrogen heating trial in Redcar due to ‘lack of H2 supply’

The UK has cancelled a highly controversial programme to test hydrogen heating in 1,800 properties in Redcar in the northeast of England, citing a lack of adequate low-carbon hydrogen supply.

The Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), which commissioned and was planning to part-subsidise the trial, made the announcement today (Thursday), just days before the gas company behind the trial, Northern Gas Networks (NGN) and government officials had scheduled a public meeting to address residents’ concerns about a range of issues, including the safety of burning hydrogen in a domestic setting and ongoing costs.

Local Member of Parliament Jacob Young wrote to the minister in charge of DESNZ, Claire Coutinho, last night, calling for the hydrogen heating trial proposal for Redcar to be revived if “issues” with it are resolved.

Teeside supply

Meanwhile NGN expressed disappointment at the cancellation of their proposal.

“Unfortunately, today, the government confirmed that our Redcar Hydrogen Community project will not be going ahead,” the company said in a statement. “This is because there will not be adequate low carbon hydrogen available to supply the Redcar Hydrogen Community. As a result, the government has decided that the project is no longer deliverable.”

H2Teeside is currently undergoing public consultation, with plans to bring 1GW on line by 2030. However, in October one of the local authorities warned that it is taking longer than expected to remove hazardous materials from the site planned for the project, a former steelworks.

But the second, more likely, candidate is the HyGreen Teeside project operated by BP, which was absent from today’s subsidy awards, either because it dropped out or its bid was unsuccessful.

Sensors

The decision to cancel was also made amid growing opposition among residents and serious questions about whether NGN had consent to proceed, especially as the government said it would only move forward with “strong public support”.

The trial was scheduled to launch in 2025, with residents set to be cut off from the fossil gas network and forced to choose between switching to a hydrogen boiler or an electric equivalent — a heat pump or electric boiler.

Apart from the matter of public consent, residents opposed to the trial expressed concerns about the safety of using hydrogen in homes or local businesses.

A report commissioned by the UK’s safety regulators in 2021 recommended installing four-inch square ventilation holes in rooms with a hydrogen appliance to prevent ignition of hydrogen, which is prone to leak and could present a fire or explosion risk.

However, NGN said it would install hydrogen sensors instead of the ventilation holes, but some have warned that sensors are unreliable, hard to come by and difficult to maintain.

Trials on ten prototype domestic hydrogen sensors carried out by NGN and utility Wales and West in 2022 resulted in an 80% failure rate — ie, only two of the ten models passed all the tests even when they were limited to compensate for the sensors’ sensitivity to humidity and temperature.

Consent?

DESNZ originally commissioned the trial — and paid out 90% of NGN’s design costs — with the aim of testing hydrogen in the network ahead of a decision on whether to support hydrogen heating more generally.

Experts have speculated that the gas companies’ primary aim in promoting the trial is to secure a legal basis for future investment in the gas network — for which, under the UK’s regulated asset base rules, gas companies can later claim compensation if the gas network is eventually shut down.

Following the PR disaster surrounding the proposal in Ellesmere Port, the UK government promised that no trial would go ahead without “strong local support”, which NGN claimed to have achieved in Redcar on the back of a survey it carried out in late 2022.