Draft Climate Change (Targeted Greenhouse Gases) Order 2022

Alan Whitehead Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2023 General Committees

[Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I think we can be brief in our discussions.

As the Minister has stated, nitrogen trifluoride is an unbelievably potent greenhouse gas—17,000 times as potent over a 100-year period as carbon dioxide—but it is not at present on the inventory list in the Climate Change Act 2008. That is partially because, particularly at the time of the passing of that Act, it was not recognised quite how potent nitrogen trifluoride was.

As the Minister says, nitrogen trifluoride is not used to an enormous extent in industry, but it is overwhelmingly human made, with very little occurring in nature. Pretty much all of it is a result of its manufacture for industrial processes. That was known about shortly after the Climate Change Act came into place; indeed, it was included in the greenhouse gas protocols in about 2013, with the requirement that countries should introduce it into their national inventories.

We absolutely welcome the addition of nitrogen trifluoride to the list of designated greenhouse gas substances in the Climate Change Act, but there is a slight question mark as to why it has taken this long. It really should have been designated a number of years ago, albeit I appreciate that there has been a process of discovery about nitrogen trifluoride over a period.

I am slightly concerned that nitrogen trifluoride is still being used to some extent in the UK for industrial processes. I hope the Minister will join me in saying that, particularly as a result of this designation, under no circumstances should nitrogen trifluoride continue to be used in industrial processes anywhere in the UK. I say that because there are perfectly good alternatives for the purposes for which it was historically manufactured and used, albeit possibly at slightly greater expense to industry. We face a position in which industry is possibly using nitrogen trifluoride simply for cost purposes, when its greenhouse gas potential is now well known and, as of today, clearly designated in the Climate Change Act.

I hope the Minister will say that we are not just recording the use of nitrogen trifluoride but earnestly pursuing its non-use in this country for the future, and that we look forward to the time when, although it is designated in the Climate Change Act, there will actually be no emissions of the gas to record as far as the UK base is concerned.