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Helping Fuel a Green Revolution


This article is part of a special report Climate Solutionslooks to worldwide efforts to make a difference.


The 75-year-old living in Bibba Thompson and her environs in a local government housing community in northern England is unlike any revolutionary.

But they’re happily participating in a home energy trial billed by organizers as part of a new “green industrial revolution,” which they hope will put their small communities at the forefront of global energy changes for the second time in three centuries.

Since August, Ms. Thompson, 58, and her neighbors in the hill village of Winlaton outside of Newcastle have been running their gas heaters and stoves with a mixture containing up to 20 percent hydrogen. Reason? to reduce gases that warm the climate, such as carbon dioxide, emitted by devices.

Hosting the United Nations climate talks in Glasgow, the British government has committed to one of the world’s most ambitious emissions reduction targets, promising to reduce greenhouse gases by 78 percent by 2035. Match promises with action.

Lower hydrogen levels in the fuel mix have been tried in trials in Australia and elsewhere, and the Netherlands has allowed blends of up to 12 percent, but the gas grid operators who conducted the Winlaton trial in 670 homes say this is the first time. A 20 percent hydrogen mixture was put into an existing gas network with normal gas appliances.

The firms argue this is an important step towards reducing Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions, and they hope it will eventually encourage the use of 100 percent hydrogen in home heaters, which the government says accounts for around 14 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.

While the government is focused on promoting the use of hydrogen for industrial customers rather than home heating, gas companies are desperate for huge pipe networks to play a central role in the nation’s heating, and part of their strategy is to persuade the public to make this transition. hydrogenation will be clean, easy, inexpensive and safe.

“A few people were like, ‘Will my boiler explode?’ was skeptical about it. but everything went well and they are very happy about it now,” says Ms Thompson, who lives at the property and manages the 55-unit complex for people over 65. “Older people think cleaning up is great for kids. It really strikes a chord here because of its descendants and our history.” “We may be a small village, but we have a big coal legacy.”

Winlaton really played a big part in the era that first released fossil fuels on a mass scale.

A few hundred yards from Miss Thompson’s housing project, just behind the library on Church Street, sits a 330-year-old forge, the last remnant of an operation that made Winlaton such a pivotal place in the Industrial Revolution.

The forge was part of an enterprise founded in 1691. Ambrose Crowley This became Europe’s largest ironworks, with hundreds of workers removing nails and chains for other iron goods, including slave handcuffs for the Royal Navy and the British colonies. This was years before the invention of the steam engine and other machinery, which is generally regarded as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Val Scully, a trustee of the local heritage centre, said Mr Crowley’s main contribution was to pioneer mass production techniques and create an industrial working class working side by side on weekly salaries. It was this system that allowed the inventions of the next decades to flourish and unleash the gin of coal power, a gin that much of the world is now desperately trying to put back in its bottle.

Tim Harwood, head of hydrogen projects at Northern Gas Networks, a pipeline operator, said: A chance to become the home of the “next green industrial revolution”.

The region is already a major focus of offshore wind power, and the government sees industrial clusters around Newcastle and Hull as hubs it hopes will be the conversion to clean-burning hydrogen.

The lower calorific value of hydrogen means that offering a 20 percent blend to all natural gas customers will reduce their emissions from heating by 7 percent, with a cut of around 1 percent from overall emissions in Britain. The big payoff would come with a switch to pure hydrogen, which could cut more than a tenth of the nation’s emissions. But it will also require the installation of millions of new devices – a huge challenge.

Mr Harwood said the blending was “just a stepping stone and a way to promote the transition to hydrogen.”

Many analysts and some government ministers doubt that the nation will be able to produce enough hydrogen to propel it beyond heavy industries in the foreseeable future.

Challenges include reducing production costs fast enough to reduce the subsidies needed to keep the price of hydrogen competitive, and moving as quickly as possible from “blue hydrogen” made with methane, which requires its own carbon to be captured and stored underground. emissions to cleaner “green hydrogen,” which needs more electricity to produce but no carbon emissions.

Gas operators are trying to step things up and are willing not to be bypassed in the government’s effort to install potentially cleaner electric heat pumps already popular in continental Europe.

“Considering the 23 million customers in the UK who source gas, we expect to reach up to 16 million customers with hydrogen,” said Mr Harwood.

“You can’t put heat pumps in most Winlaton homes,” he said, “because the housing stock is old, leaking, and cold and heat pumps don’t generate enough heat without special insulation.”

Mr Harwood said existing programs to upgrade the gas grid by replacing metal pipes with hydrogen-ready plastic should be finished by the time enough hydrogen is produced to consider switching heating to pure hydrogen, and gas companies are asking the government to authorize it. All new gas boilers must be able to be converted to hydrogen as soon as possible.

The government has announced plans to experiment with a “hydrogen village” in which around 2,000 properties will run on pure hydrogen from 2025, followed by a “hydrogen town” of up to 15,000 properties by 2030, but gas operators would prefer to see this program accelerated, Mr Harwood said.

Dave Tully, a 63-year-old ex-military cop who lives in a two-bedroom terrace house in Winlaton, said he had received leaflets about the 10-month trial and free security inspection of his devices, but still felt “railed”. take part.

“I think it will continue no matter what the public thinks, but in the end that’s probably fair enough,” he said. “It turns out that it doesn’t change the way our stove or heater works at all, and I think we need to do something about climate change, so this sort of thing is probably necessary.”

The hydrogen campaign in Winlaton includes invitations to two exhibit houses where locals can see their 100 percent hydrogen stoves and heaters are the same size as existing gas appliances. The only noticeable difference is that the flame the burners are orange instead of blue and have a larger “sunflower” shape to distribute the heat over a larger area, as hydrogen is lighter and tends to rise in heat more quickly.

Mr Harwood said he hopes to see these new flames warm English cups of tea in a decade.



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