Future Hydrogen Economy

Peter Aldous Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2022 Westminster Hall

[Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)]

Thank you, Sir Edward; I will do what I can on that. It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Jacob Young) on securing this debate.

The Government have adopted a cluster approach to the promotion of the hydrogen economy. I fully understand the rationale for doing so, but the regulatory framework must be sufficiently flexible, so that more decentralised areas, such as the east of England, are able to realise their full potential. That way, we can not only more readily realise our decarbonisation goals but create new and exciting jobs.

In East Anglia we have a real opportunity to be a major producer, user and exporter of hydrogen. We have an abundance of resources, infrastructure—both on land and at sea—that can be readily retrofitted, and developers keen to step up to the plate, provided that the right policies are in place. Hydrogen East, last month, produced its proposal and proposed next steps for developing a clean hydrogen cluster in the east of England, which I shall forward to my right hon. Friend the Minister for his bedside reading.

I shall briefly highlight the projects that have already been initiated and outline those bigger opportunities that are at the design stage, which can have a national—and quite likely an international—impact. There are some exciting projects, as I said, that are already in the pipeline that highlight the role that hydrogen can play across the East Anglian region. Those include the Freeport East project centred on Felixstowe and Harwich, which could see the early adoption of hydrogen for portside related operation and other local uses.

In Lowestoft, in my constituency, there is the Lowestoft PowerPark project, which can lead to hydrogen being used to power municipal buses and the refuse fleet, as well as the development of flexible generation, or flexgen. There is also the Bacton energy hub project, using the infrastructure laid down over 60 years to serve the oil and gas industry in the southern North sea. In addition, work is ongoing on the switchover of agricultural and other off-road vehicles, especially in remote rural areas.

Those schemes are very much paving the way and laying the foundations for larger projects, including the development of electrolysis capacity in conjunction with nuclear energy and heat to support the proposed development at Sizewell C, which will be the first ever major construction project to use hydrogen vehicles at scale.

Cadent and National Grid’s new project, Capital Hydrogen, which is due to be launched in the autumn, will produce hydrogen in East Anglia not only to serve homes and businesses in the area, but to power London. Cadent has also identified five points in the east of England where hydrogen could be injected almost immediately to kick-start the move towards the 20% hydrogen blend that can be used in the existing gas network, with no need to change appliances or adjust the network. That project will help to stimulate rapid growth in the amount of low-carbon hydrogen produced in the region, but to make it happen, the Government need to change the regulations and allow hydrogen into the network.

In conclusion, East Anglia does not want a hydrogen economy in which we adopt second-generation or third-generation technologies and assets from other areas. What we want is to maximise our own potential and build our very own bespoke network; what we need is a framework that incentivises small-scale projects to be developed, in the knowledge that they can be scaled up in due course. I hope that in his summing up, my right hon. Friend the Minister will confirm that he is up for that challenge.