We have picked up on a report that current gas appliances including cookers, built in hobs and so could possibly be converted to use hydrogen gas rather than becoming obsolete as many have feared.
The trouble is that gas appliances are not terribly efficient in terms of carbon emissions so, chances are that they will slowly be phased out. Some suppliers of gas products are already predicting that by about 2020 gas fuelled appliances will be hard to come by.
The reason is that in order to reduce carbon emissions many countries across the EU are looking to effectively get rid of gas as a fuel source.
Of course with Gas Safe registration and qualification being so expensive many within the appliance servicing sphere are looking at the wisdom of investing into the ability to service products that may well die off in the not too distant future.
This report may cast some doubt on that position, if it can be done.
It is reckoned that cooking and heating appliance (so it include gas boilers etc) accounts for about 30% of all heat emissions in the UK and it is mooted that could be reduced by 73%.
Dan Sadler from the Leeds H21 project for Northern Gas says that moving to hydrogen, “is technically possible, economically viable and will be a significant contributor to meeting the UK’s decarbonisation targets”.
“This is a major opportunity for our country to become a world leader in hydrogen technology and decarbonisation and would create thousands of new jobs across the UK,”
The existing infrastructure could be used so, no need to lay new pipes or any of that but products on the new supply would need to be converted to use the new supply.
“Households won’t be required to buy new appliances,” explained Sadler. “The conversion process will be similar to that carried out in the 1960s and 70s when 40 million appliances across 14 million households were converted from town gas to natural gas. We’d have special teams, working street by street to make the conversion as smooth as possible for customers with minimal impact in the homes and the highways.” said Mr Sadler.
Now call us pessimistic but, there’s no mention of how much this would cost or how long it would take but to have squads of people going door to door converting products, many of which there will not be the spare parts to do it with, is going to carry a monumentally high cost.
Appliances that cannot be converted will probably have to be changed. Another big cost.
As you might expect, there’s not a mention of who will foot the bill for all that but we’d expect it will be owners one way or another.
There is a bigger problem however.
How to you make all that hydrogen and at what cost in terms of energy use?
Sure you can, as hard been mooted for hydrogen cars, use windmills and so on to do it but it still uses huge amounts of energy as we understand it to “make” hydrogen so, isn’t that just shifting the problem from one place to another and not actually solving it?
Sure you may well reduce emissions in the longer term but, the upfront cost may not make that viable.
Then of course there’s the perception of hydrogen, anyone recall the Hindenburg?
It probably is a lot more complex, there will be all sorts of science and economic arguments tossed about but in the end, we can’t see this one coming to fruition.
