Government Seeks Advice on Crimes Against Thermodynamics

A new review on Greenhouse Gas Removals and a consultation on power from hydrogen.

Introduction

Almost everyday I receive an email from DESNZ that lets me know what they are up to. Most of the time it is pretty innocuous stuff about granting planning permission for some pylon or other or even updates to privacy policies. But yesterday’s email was more significant than most and indicates that Red Ed is still hurtling headlong towards energy oblivion with Net Zero and his barking mad Clean Power by 2030 plan.

Greenhouse Gas Removals (GGRs)

DESNZ have noticed that they cannot hope to end hydrocarbon consumption by 2050, so they now need to work out how they can remove carbon dioxide from the air. They have appointed Dr Alan Whitehead CBE to head a review into Greenhouse Gas Removals (GGR). Up until July 2024, Whitehead was Shadow Energy Security Minister but did not stand in the last General Election.

They want him to look at how large-scale bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) can assist the UK in meeting our net zero targets, out to 2050. They want him to look at the potential scale of emissions savings, the opportunities for GGR deployment at scale, the barriers to deployment, the costs of GGRs and how to move away from public investment and attract private investment.

The trouble is, as we have discussed before, biomass is not very energy dense and a lot of the embedded energy in the wood is wasted in the pulping, drying and transportation processes that get it to a power station. This means that biomass on its own has an extremely low energy return on energy invested (EROEI). However, the position gets even worse when power plants are converted to BECCS because it takes even more energy to capture the CO₂ and pump it underground for long term storage. The Royal Society of Chemistry produced a report that suggested BECCS using willow pellets from Louisiana in America would have an EROI of less than one. This means we get less useful energy out than it takes to run the overall process making BECCS a net energy sink. We already pay massive subsidies to companies like Drax to burn trees. Adding CCS to this process will be very costly and cannot be achieved without even more subsidy. The only way private capital could be attracted to such a scheme is if they are awarded guaranteed prices that will fleece us, the customer.

They also want Whitehead to look at magic machines to suck carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. DACCS is a very energy intensive process and so will be very expensive too. Both of these hare-brained schemes are crimes against thermodynamics. We have already entered energy austerity, with energy consumption falling and per capita energy consumption is set to fall by half from 2023 levels by 2050.

We cannot afford to squander more energy and our money on daft ideas like BECCS and DACCS.

Hydrogen to Power Projects

DESNZ are also seeking views on the potential for “innovative hydrogen to power projects to accelerate deployment readiness.” They seem to want to understand how to deliver hydrogen to power (H2P) plants by 2030 “ahead of large scale enabling hydrogen infrastructure”. They believe that successful roll out of dispatchable power technologies will be vital to achieve clean power by 2030 and to accelerate to net zero. But the NESO plan for 2030 contained very little hydrogen-fired generation. And I hate to break it to them, but no innovation in the world can get a hydrogen power plant working without any hydrogen.

The response pages acknowledge that H2P plants will need what they euphemistically term a “market intervention”. They are beavering away on a “Hydrogen to Power Business Model (H2PBM) to de-risk investment” and they are looking to enable H2P projects to participate in the Capacity Market as soon as is practicable. This is all code to say that very generous subsidies will be on offer to anyone who commits to build a hydrogen power plant. Of course, without much hydrogen being produced, it will just be paid to stand idle through the capacity market and not save any emissions at all.

They also say that these plants must run on 100% low-carbon hydrogen. Now this type of hydrogen can be produced in one of two ways. The first is green hydrogen, produced by electrolysis using electricity from wind or solar power plants. The first green hydrogen projects awarded contracts in HAR1 had a strike price of £175/MWh in 2012 money or about £244/MWh at 2024 prices. If we generously assume that a hydrogen-fired power plant can operate at 50% efficiency, then electricity from such a plant would cost ~£500/MWh, more than 6-times today’s day ahead electricity price of ~£80/MWh. No wonder they are offering generous subsidies.

The second method of producing low-carbon hydrogen is from reforming methane and capturing the carbon dioxide emissions, so-called blue hydrogen. Estimates of the efficiency of this process vary from about 60-67%. At best, electricity generated from blue hydrogen will be ~50% more expensive than just burning the gas for electricity. It is impossible to overstate the thermodynamic stupidity of converting methane to hydrogen and then burning the hydrogen to produce electricity.

Conclusions

Sadly, the Net Zero mind virus is still rampaging through the Energy Department. They are busy cooking up schemes to add even more cost to our energy system. Crimes against thermodynamics maybe hidden behind bluster for a while, but in the end the penalty will be paid in our energy bills.

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