Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps the Government is taking to reduce household carbon emissions through the use of hydrogen as a replacement for gas.

Burning natural gas for heating accounts for a significant proportion of household carbon emissions. There is currently no clear consensus on the best approach to decarbonising heat at scale, and our December 2018 report on Clean Growth: Transforming Heating set out that using hydrogen as a replacement for natural gas, including for domestic heating, may play an important role.

Further work is required to better understand the potential for using hydrogen to replace natural gas in parts of the gas grid. Several projects relevant to this are currently underway. These include projects run by gas network operators, and the £25m BEIS-funded Hy4Heat programme, which is investigating the feasibility of using hydrogen for heating in residential and commercial buildings.

The Government has committed to publishing a Heat Policy Roadmap in mid-2020, setting out the next steps on heat decarbonisation.