Residents of Winlaton participated in an experiment of mixing hydrogen and natural gas to heat houses. Photo: (New York Times)

As the host of the United Nations climate negotiations in Glasgow, Scotland, the British government is committed to achieving one of the most ambitious emission reduction targets in the world, committing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 78% by 2035. Domestic heating is one of them. Must match its commitments with actions

Bibba Thompson and the 75 older people living around her living in the local government housing community in the north of England do not look like revolutionaries.

But they happily participated in a household energy experiment called by the organizers as part of the new "green industrial revolution", which they hope will put their small communities at the forefront of global energy change for the second time in three centuries.

Since August, 58-year-old Thompson and her neighbors in the hilltop village of Winlaton outside Newcastle have used mixed fuels for gas heaters and stoves, including up to 20% hydrogen. reason? Reduce climate-warming gases, such as carbon dioxide, emitted by their appliances.

As the host of the United Nations climate negotiations in Glasgow, Scotland, the British government is committed to achieving one of the most ambitious emission reduction targets in the world, committing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 78% by 2035. Domestic heating is one of them. It must match its commitments with actions.

Tests in Australia and elsewhere have tested lower levels of hydrogen in fuel mixtures. The Netherlands allows mixing up to 12%, but the natural gas network operator who organized the 670 Winraton test said this is the first time that 20% of the hydrogen has been used. The hydrogen mixture has been put into the existing gas pipe network, with ordinary gas appliances.

The two companies argue that this is an important step in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the UK, and they hope this will encourage the eventual use of 100% hydrogen in home heaters, which the government claims account for approximately 14% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions. .

Since the government is focused on supporting industrial customers to use hydrogen rather than domestic heating, natural gas companies are eager to maintain a central role in their huge pipeline network in national heating. Part of their strategy is to convince the public that it will be clean, easy, cheap and safe to convert hydrogen. .

"At first, some people doubted'Will my boiler explode?' But everything is going well and they are very satisfied with it now," lives on-site and manages a 55-unit complex for people over 65 years of age.

"Older people think that cleaning up the environment is a good thing for their grandchildren, and because of our history, it really resonates here," she said. "We may be just a small village, but we have a lot of coal heritage."

In the era when fossil fuels were released on a large scale for the first time, Winraton did play an important role.

A few hundred meters from the Thompson housing project, just behind the Church Street Library, there is a 330-year-old forge, which is the last relic that made Winraton a key location for the Industrial Revolution.

The forge was part of a company founded by Ambrose Crowley in 1691, which later became the largest steel plant in Europe, with hundreds of workers producing nails and chains for the Royal Navy and other iron products, including slave handcuffs for the British colonies. That was a few years before the invention of the steam engine and other machines that are generally believed to mark the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Val Scully, the trustee of the local heritage center, said that Crowley's main contribution is to create mass production technology and create an industrial working class, who work side by side on a weekly salary. It is this system that allowed the inventions of the next few decades to flourish and unleash the spirit of coal power. Most parts of the world are now desperately trying to put this spirit back into the bottle.

Tim Harwood, head of the hydrogen project at the pipeline operator Northern Gas Networks, said that the northeast of England has the opportunity to become the birthplace of the "next industrial revolution, the green industrial revolution."

The area is already an important focus of offshore wind energy, and the government sees the industrial clusters around Newcastle and Hull as a center where it hopes to convert it into clean-burning hydrogen.

The low calorific value of hydrogen means that the introduction of a 20% mixture to all natural gas customers will reduce their heating emissions by 7%, reducing the total emissions in the UK by about 1%. The huge reward will come from the switch to pure hydrogen, which can reduce US emissions by more than one-tenth. But it also requires the installation of millions of new devices-this is a huge challenge.

Harwood said that mixing is "just a stepping stone and a way to stimulate the conversion to hydrogen."

Many analysts and some government ministers doubt that in the foreseeable future, the country will be able to produce enough hydrogen to extend it beyond heavy industry.

Challenges include reducing production costs fast enough to reduce the subsidies required to make hydrogen price-competitive, and getting rid of the use of "blue hydrogen" as quickly as possible, which is made from methane and needs to be captured and stored underground Its own carbon emissions, to cleaner "green hydrogen", it needs more electricity to produce but no carbon emissions.

Natural gas operators are trying to speed things up and hope not to be bypassed in the government's efforts to promote the installation of potentially clean electric heat pumps that are already popular on the European continent.

"If you consider that the UK has 23 million customers with natural gas supply, we want to use hydrogen to penetrate 16 million customers," Harwood said.

"You can't install a heat pump in most homes in Winlaton," he said, "because the house is old, leaking and cold, and without special insulation, the heat pump cannot generate enough heat."

Harwood said that the current plan to upgrade the natural gas network by replacing metal pipelines with hydrogenable plastics should be completed when enough hydrogen is produced to consider converting heating to pure hydrogen. Must be able to be converted into hydrogen.

The government has announced a "Hydrogen Village" test plan, in which about 2,000 properties will be operated on pure hydrogen from 2025, and then a "hydrogen town" with as many as 15,000 properties will be built by 2030, but Harwood said , Natural gas operators will be more willing to see the timetable speed up.

Dave Tully, a 63-year-old former military policeman who lives in a two-bedroom terraced house in Winraton, said that he received leaflets about a 10-month trial period and free safety inspections of his appliances, but he still felt "Fettered" participated.

"I think it will continue no matter what the public thinks, but in the end, it may be fair enough," he said. "It turns out that it hasn't changed the way our cookers or heaters work at all. I think we have to do something about climate change, so this kind of thing may be necessary."

The hydrogen event at Winraton included invitations to visit two exhibition houses where locals can see 100% hydrogen furnaces and heaters the same size as existing gas appliances. The only obvious difference is that the flame of the burner is orange instead of blue, and has a wider "sunflower" shape, which can distribute heat more widely, because hydrogen is lighter and its heat tends to rise faster.

Harwood said he hopes to see these new flames heating up British tea cups within ten years.

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