Is hydrogen going to replace gas
How might hydrogen help heat our homes?
How might hydrogen help heat our homes?
Updated October 2023
You might have heard about the latest plans to switch the UKs gas supply to hydrogen and that the gas boilers we currently use will eventually be phased out.
But what does that mean for you and your home? And does it mean youll have to fork out for a completely new kind of boiler?
In this article, well bring you up to speed with the latest plans. Well explain what might happen, and why it could be good news for everyone.
Are gas boilers being banned soon?
Short answer: no, not really.
You might have seen headlines about natural gas boilers being banned from 2025. But thats just for new-build properties, not for existing homes and boilers.
In fact, as youll see from the estimated timescales below, a boiler you buy today will probably use natural gas for all its working lifetime.
After that, the two main ways to heat your home could well be with a heat pump or with a boiler that runs at least partly on hydrogen.
The big switch to hydrogen
The UK government is looking at plans to replace natural gas with hydrogen gas because its much more environmentally friendly.
But if this happens, it will be a gradual process that takes years, rather than something that changes all at once.And that means it shouldnt be extra hassle or expense for homeowners. In fact, some of the biggest boiler manufacturers in the UK have promised that hydrogen-ready boilers wont cost any more than a regular gas-powered boiler.1
The first step in any hydrogen transition would likely be introducing a 20% hydrogen blend into the UK mains supply. Most boilers would be able to use this hydrogen blend without any problems. In fact, many new boilers are already labelled hydrogen-blend ready in case this first move towards hydrogen happens.
In the meantime, boiler manufacturers are working on a new hydrogen-ready standard which will mean the UK can switch as easily as possible to 100% hydrogen much further down the line. The important thing to realise is that hydrogen-ready boilers are still in development, whereas hydrogen-blend ready boilers are widely available.
The government is currently carrying out trials to work through all the cost, feasibility and safety issues and theyre expected to make firm decisions on what role hydrogen will play in heating the UKs homes by 2026.
Its still unclear if hydrogen will play a role in heating homes. But if it does, any switch to hydrogen is likely to happen in three main stages.
Stage 1
If the government decides to go ahead, new boilers would be built to a new hydrogen-ready standard, which means theyd work with natural gas but could also be easily modified to run on 100% hydrogen. According to some industry estimates, these boilers could be available before 2025.
Stage 2
A 20% hydrogen blend could be introduced into the gas supply. Most boilers would be able to use this as normal including all new British Gas boilers. Any rollout of 20% hydrogen isnt expected to begin until 2028 at the very earliest.
Stage 3
If the country switches to 100% hydrogen, every new boiler sold in the UK would simply be a hydrogen boiler. If this does happen, it probably wont be until the mid-2040s.
What would a hydrogen boiler be?
A hydrogen boiler would be very similar to a natural gas boiler, except it would run on 100% hydrogen.
Hydrogen does burn differently to natural gas, so there would be some design changes inside the boiler itself.
But the basic principles are the same which is why some people think theyd be a great way to decarbonise our homes.
How much would hydrogen boilers cost?
Good news. Hydrogen boilers are still at prototype stage, but manufacturers are confident they shouldn't cost any more than the equivalent natural gas boilers.
What would be the advantages of hydrogen?
Natural gas is a fossil fuel that produces CO2 when burned. And that makes heating our homes one of the biggest contributors to climate change in the UK.
Hydrogen is very different though. Burning hydrogen creates no CO2 and there are also ways of making hydrogen gas that are very carbon efficient.
Hydrogen is so promising as a low-carbon fuel that the government is exploring whether it could help reach our goal of being net zero as a country by 2050.
If you want to learn a bit more about what makes hydrogen boilers so important, take a look at this blog post by Chris OShea, our CEO.
When could a transition to hydrogen happen?
The simple answer is nobody really knows for sure at the moment.
Our best guess is that any introduction of a 20% hydrogen blend could happen within the next decade, but a switch to 100% hydrogen would take significantly longer.
This relatively slow change means most people would have updated to a hydrogen-ready boiler by the time any switch happens, so adapting to the new type of gas would be relatively painless.
Its also important to realise that hydrogen boilers are just one part of the governments plan to decarbonise the heating of our homes.
Heat pumps are also expected to play a key role in keeping us warm and cosy while protecting the planet too. You can find out more about them in this article.
Why cant we transition to hydrogen faster?
There are a few reasons.
Firstly, converting all the boilers in the UK would be a big job, even if the changes needed to each boiler are fairly small.
Secondly, hydrogen boilers are still at prototype stage. So even if the government decided to transition to hydrogen, manufacturers arent ready to produce new boilers yet.
And finally, theres the supply issue the UK doesnt currently produce enough hydrogen to power everyones boilers.
Solving these challenges will take a bit of time, but some progress has been made already. So its still possible that a cleaner, greener, hydrogen-powered future is just around the corner!
Back to the Source
The Future of Hydrogen
The time is right to tap into hydrogens potential to play a key role in a clean, secure and affordable energy future.At the request of the government of Japan under its G20 presidency, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has produced this landmark report to analyse the current state of play for hydrogen and to offer guidance on its future development. The report finds that clean hydrogen is currently enjoying unprecedented political and business momentum, with the number of policies and projects around the world expanding rapidly. It concludes that now is the time to scale up technologies and bring down costs to allow hydrogen to become widely used. The pragmatic and actionable recommendations to governments and industry that are provided will make it possible to take full advantage of this increasing momentum.
Hydrogen can help tackle various critical energy challenges.It offers ways to decarbonise a range of sectors including long-haul transport, chemicals, and iron and steel where it is proving difficult to meaningfully reduce emissions. It can also help improve air quality and strengthen energy security. Despite very ambitious international climate goals, global energy-related CO2emissions reached an all time high in 2018. Outdoor air pollution also remains a pressing problem, with around 3million people dying prematurely each year.
Hydrogen is versatile.Technologies already available today enable hydrogen to produce, store, move and use energy in different ways. A wide variety of fuels are able to produce hydrogen, including renewables, nuclear, natural gas, coal and oil. It can be transported as a gas by pipelines or in liquid form by ships, much like liquefied natural gas (LNG). It can be transformed into electricity and methane to power homes and feed industry, and into fuels for cars, trucks, ships and planes.
Hydrogen can enable renewables to provide an even greater contribution.It has the potential to help with variable output from renewables, like solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind, whose availability is not always well matched with demand. Hydrogen is one of the leading options for storing energy from renewables and looks promising to be a lowest-cost option for storing electricity over days, weeks or even months. Hydrogen and hydrogen-based fuels can transport energy from renewables over long distances from regions with abundant solar and wind resources, such as Australia or Latin America, to energy-hungry cities thousands of kilometres away.
There have been false starts for hydrogen in the past; this time could be different.The recent successes of solar PV, wind, batteries and electric vehicles have shown that policy and technology innovation have the power to build global clean energy industries. With a global energy sector in flux, the versatility of hydrogen is attracting stronger interest from a diverse group of governments and companies. Support is coming from governments that both import and export energy as well as renewable electricity suppliers, industrial gas producers, electricity and gas utilities, automakers, oil and gas companies, major engineering firms, and cities. Investments in hydrogen can help foster new technological and industrial development in economies around the world, creating skilled jobs.
Hydrogen can be used much more widely.Today, hydrogen is used mostly in oil refining and for the production of fertilisers. For it to make a significant contribution to clean energy transitions, it also needs to be adopted in sectors where it is almost completely absent at the moment, such as transport, buildings and power generation.
However, clean, widespread use of hydrogen in global energy transitions faces several challenges:
- Producing hydrogen from low-carbon energy is costly at the moment. IEA analysis finds that the cost of producing hydrogen from renewable electricity could fall 30% by 2030 as a result of declining costs of renewables and the scaling up of hydrogen production. Fuel cells, refuelling equipment and electrolysers (which produce hydrogen from electricity and water) can all benefit from mass manufacturing.
- The development of hydrogen infrastructure is slow and holding back widespread adoption.Hydrogen prices for consumers are highly dependent on how many refuelling stations there are, how often they are used and how much hydrogen is delivered per day. Tackling this is likely to require planning and coordination that brings together national and local governments, industry and investors.
- Hydrogen is almost entirely supplied from natural gas and coal today.Hydrogen is already with us at industrial scale all around the world, but its production is responsible for annual CO2emissions equivalent to those of Indonesia and the United Kingdom combined. Harnessing this existing scale on the way to a clean energy future requires both the capture of CO2from hydrogen production from fossil fuels and greater supplies of hydrogen from clean electricity.
- Regulations currently limit the development of a clean hydrogen industry.Government and industry must work together to ensure existing regulations are not an unnecessary barrier to investment. Trade will benefit from common international standards for the safety of transporting and storing large volumes of hydrogen and for tracing the environmental impacts of different hydrogen supplies.
The IEA has identified four near-term opportunities to boost hydrogen on the path towards its clean, widespread use. Focusing on these real-world springboards could help hydrogen achieve the necessary scale to bring down costs and reduce risks for governments and the private sector. While each opportunity has a distinct purpose, all four also mutually reinforce one another.
- Make industrial ports the nerve centres for scaling up the use of clean hydrogen.Today, much of the refining and chemicals production that uses hydrogen based on fossil fuels is already concentrated in coastal industrial zones around the world, such as the North Sea in Europe, the Gulf Coast in NorthAmerica and southeastern China. Encouraging these plants to shift to cleaner hydrogen production would drive down overall costs. These large sources of hydrogen supply can also fuel ships and trucks serving the ports and power other nearby industrial facilities like steel plants.
- Build on existing infrastructure, such as millions of kilometres of natural gas pipelines.Introducing clean hydrogen to replace just 5% of the volume of countries natural gas supplies would significantly boost demand for hydrogen and drive down costs.
- Expand hydrogen in transport through fleets, freight and corridors.Powering high-mileage cars, trucks and buses to carry passengers and goods along popular routes can make fuel-cell vehicles more competitive.
- Launch the hydrogen trades first international shipping routes.Lessons from the successful growth of the global LNG market can be leveraged. International hydrogen trade needs to start soon if it is to make an impact on the global energy system.
International cooperation is vital to accelerate the growth of versatile, clean hydrogen around the world.If governments work to scale up hydrogen in a coordinated way, it can help to spur investments in factories and infrastructure that will bring down costs and enable the sharing of knowledge and best practices. Trade in hydrogen will benefit from common international standards. As the global energy organisation that covers all fuels and all technologies, the IEA will continue to provide rigorous analysis and policy advice to support international cooperation and to conduct effective tracking of progress in the years ahead.
As a roadmap for the future, we are offering seven key recommendations to help governments, companies and others to seize this chance to enable clean hydrogen to fulfil its long-term potential.
