Delays to hydrogen initiatives in the UK are the country's hydrogen projects and holding back billions of pounds of investment according to Clare Jackson, CEO of trade body Hydrogen UK.

    "Hydrogen is essential for the hard-to-abate sectors that cannot simply electrify, but the ongoing delay of the UK’s refreshed hydrogen strategy is now putting real projects at risk,” Jackson said as part of a joint letter addressed to the UK government.

“The long-overdue decisions for the second Hydrogen Allocation Round, (HAR2), is holding back investment in the North East, North West and Yorkshire and the Humber,” she added.

The UK government had previously said its new hydrogen strategy — which targets usage of hydrogen in industrial applications, transportation, and as a fuel — would be published in the autumn of 2025, but it has yet to be released.

The UK government’s original hydrogen strategy was published in 2021 and had targeted 10GW low-carbon hydrogen production by 2030, but those targets have been reduced.

The UK has also yet to publish the results of its second round of the Hydrogen Allocation Rounds (HAR 2) — a Contracts for Difference auction system for which 27 green hydrogen projects were shortlisted last year — as well as the outcomes of the market engagement exercise for the third round (HAR 3) that was first announced in December 2023.

Jackson's comments follow similar criticisms levelled at the UK government over the last few months — in January this year, a senior advisor at a London-headquartered consulting firm warned green hydrogen projects hoping to secure subsidies from the UK’s second Hydrogen Allocation Round (HAR2) are now at risk of failure due to policy delays.

Similarly in February this year the UK’s Hydrogen Energy Association (HEA) said delays to hydrogen initiatives by the UK government are putting 17,000 jobs and billions of pounds in private investment at risk.

The joint letter which Jackson signed — co-signed by senior representatives from the Carbon Capture and Storage Association and Electrify Industry — also called on the government to “accelerate the electrification, hydrogen and CCUS [carbon capture, utilisation, and storage] programmes” in the UK’s Industrial decarbonisation Strategy (IDS), last updated in 2021.

In the IDS, the UK government laid out a plan to “show how the UK can have a thriving industrial sector aligned with the net zero target”.
 

Source:  Hydrogen UK