Net zero: hitting the buffers

By Richard North - December 20, 2022

There is something very odd going on inside Nick Timothy’s head. While we are looking at doom and destruction all around us, the man who sorted Brexit for Theresa May has now popped up in the Telegraph to tell us that, if we embrace the tech revolution, an era of startling progress beckons.

Top of Timothy’s list, though, is the “good news” that scientists in California have, he claims, “achieved something spectacular”, the supposed net energy gain in a nuclear fusion reaction.

We may, writes Timothy, “still be years from fleets of fusion power stations, but it is no longer a fantasy to imagine an abundant source of zero-carbon energy powering the world economy”.

Timothy, of course, is not the only one to be taken in by the fusion hype and an experiment which delivered less than a thousandth of the total energy pumped into the system and, in any event, is probably a developmental dead-end. As such, the prospect of seeing “an abundant source of zero-carbon energy powering the world economy” at any time in the foreseeable future probably is indeed fantasy.

Bringing us back down to earth is the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee which has been looking at a more prosaic future, coming up with a report on “The role of hydrogen in achieving Net Zero”.

It is hard to improve on the summary of the report produced, or the conclusions. Inter alia, the Committee tells us that hydrogen used in a Net Zero system will be either produced by processes which generate carbon dioxide but which is permanently extracted and stored (“blue hydrogen”), or through the use of renewable power to allow the electrolysis of water (“green hydrogen”).

Carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS), it tells us, is a technology that is currently not deployed at the large scale required to make a material contribution to our emissions reductions, nor are the economic and commercial conditions established for its mass use. This means, the Committee says, that blue hydrogen cannot be relied on as a high-volume contribution to decarbonisation in the short- to medium-term.

On the other hand, it says, the rapid expansion of renewable energy provides important possibilities for the mass production of green hydrogen in the future. But currently, the Committee has been appraised of the inconvenient fact that there is unmet need for renewable-sourced electricity to contribute directly to our power supplies as demand for electricity rises in both domestic and industrial settings.

However, to make a large contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the UK, the production of hydrogen requires significant advances in the economic deployment of CCUS and/or the development of a renewable-to-hydrogen capacity.

Unfortunately, says the Committee, the timing of these is uncertain, and it would be unwise to assume that hydrogen can make a very large contribution to reducing UK greenhouse gas emissions in the short- to medium-term.

Using hydrogen to replace fossil fuels within our energy system, it adds, would entail significant investment in the networks and infrastructure needed to distribute it around the country. For example, were hydrogen to replace petrol and diesel in passenger cars and heavy goods vehicles, an extensive and new network of hydrogen refuelling stations would be needed across the UK.

Turning then to the prospect of hydrogen completely or substantially replacing gas in domestic heating systems, it tells us that a massive and costly programme of replacing boilers, meters and network infrastructure would likely be required. This, to be blunt, makes it a non-starter, a point picked up by two newspapers that have covered the report.

The Telegraph headlines: “Government’s hydrogen boiler plan is unrealistic, warn MPs”, with the sub-heading: “The clean-burning gas is likely to play a ‘limited role’ in the future energy system”. The Times, on the other hand, simply tells us, “Hydrogen ‘too costly and inefficient’ to heat homes”.

The Committee itself concludes, as a result, that it seems likely that any future use of hydrogen will be limited rather than universal. It thus disagrees with the Climate Change Committee’s recommendation that the Government should mandate new domestic boilers to be hydrogen-ready from 2025.

Hydrogen will have its place, it says, but it does not believe that it will be the panacea to our problems that might sometimes be inferred from the hopes placed on it.

Where that leaves us, or to be more specific, where it leaves “net zero”, the Committee doesn’t say. But we do know that “decarbonising” domestic heating is a vital part of the climate change religion, and the zealots are determined to rid us of our gas boilers.

So far, heat pumps have been the front-runners in the replacement stakes but, while the market for these devices is growing, that growth will doubtless hit the buffers as the cost implications strike home.

The idea of using hydrogen as an alternative, therefore, has been growing in popularity amongst the zealots, who have been looking to this as an easier option. But amid a distinct lack of enthusiasm at the sharp end – not least because hydrogen would cost on average around 70-90 percent more than natural gas – this dose of reality from the Science and Technology Committee is essentially sounding the death knell for this option in the domestic context, even if the message is muted.

When we also see Toyota chief Akio Toyoda pour cold water on the idea that electric vehicles will alone be able to end reliance on fossil fuels, we have another nail in the coffin for “net zero” emerging.

In reality, it should not need Akio Toyoda to tell us this, as anyone with a brain – which would exclude most climate zealots – would already know that there are simply not enough raw materials to replace the existing fleets of internal combustion-engined cars.

Thus, if the programme of banning ICE cars is to be sustained, either an alternative to EVs must be found or personal mobility must be severely curtailed. When it comes down to depriving people of their personal transport, though – and the inherent freedoms that go with it – politicians might find that their plans evaporate in the face of sustained opposition.

All of this suggests that the current model for “net zero” is foundering. And as we get closer to key cut-off dates – with the ban on gas boilers in new houses supposedly coming into force in 2025 – resistance will no doubt stiffen and there will be pressure to relax the “net zero” timetable.

One can see, therefore, the attraction of the idea of nuclear fusion to weak minds like Nick Timothy who, with legions of scientifically illiterate fools, is grasping at straws to find a way of realising “net zero” without destroying the economy and bringing an end to civilisation as we know it.

But there is something more sinister to this obsession. As critical systems in this country progressively fail, with the NHS on life-support, the rail system no longer functioning, the housing market in turmoil, immigration out of control and energy on its way to becoming unaffordable, it is much easier to dwell on some hypothetical future than address the problems in the here and now.

Unable to deal with the burgeoning issues that are confronting us, fools like Timothy are retreating into a fantasy future in a world where the miracles of science will solve all our problems, ignoring the fact that, in the present, heart attack victims can’t even be guaranteed an ambulance.

As for climate change and “net zero”, quite evidently it is much more rewarding to play at solving the world’s future problems than to acknowledge that, at the current rate of societal decay, many people won’t have a future at all.