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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what plans he has to introduce carbon pricing to encourage clean hydrogen production from nuclear energy and renewable energy sources.

The UK has an ambitious carbon pricing mechanism through our new UK Emissions Trading Scheme, launched at the start of this year to increase our carbon pricing ambition over the EU scheme it replaces. The UK ETS will be the world’s first net zero carbon cap and trade market, and a crucial step towards achieving the UK’s target for net zero carbon emissions by 2050. We have committed to explore expanding the UK ETS to other sectors.

We are also consulting on a business model to provide revenue support to low carbon hydrogen production plants in order to unlock private investment in hydrogen projects.

This will be complemented by the £240m Net-Zero Hydrogen Fund (NZHF), aimed at supporting multiple low carbon production routes that can realistically deploy in the 2020s to contribute to our 5GW ambition. As described in our recent Hydrogen Strategy, electrolysis using low carbon power, renewable or nuclear, will have an important role as we scale up UK hydrogen production.