The language of the British Government’s new “Blueprint for the future of energy” is certainly not backward in coming forward. It is going “to consolidate Britain’s position as a global leader in green energy” and as such, influence the world. We are going to become leaders in small modular nuclear power and become the world’s greatest at carbon capture, usage and storage. We will lead on blue hydrogen and accelerate renewables. We will replace all our household gas boilers by 2035 and insulate the worst of our houses. We will decarbonise transport, while planning decisions will be speeded up. Meanwhile, we will “mobilise” private capital and build on the tremendous job we did while we were the president of CAP 26.

Wow! Yet the trouble with this lot of affirmations is that they are mostly aspirational and will be so for a very long time. The least vague of these is the focus on Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) on which the Government proposes to give Rolls Royce £210 million to make a decision on the design. This is particularly important with SMRs because the object of the exercise is to build a lot of them in a factory, without having all the upheaval of clearing lots of land for a big one. You can then churn out many identical small plants and dot them about the countryside, wherever your base-load is most required. Or alternatively you can dump five or six of them in small groups, wherever they’re needed.

Reliability is extremely important in the case of SMRs for the obvious reason that since their main advantage is that they are all identical and factory produced, if one fails, all the rest are likely to do so too. There are also rather a lot of economic unknowns about them. Can you cut back the workforce? Do they produced more nuclear waste for less electricity? Does Britain have enough rivers to provide adequate cooling water inland? Are you going to be able to buy off local opposition to sites in the countryside? Are they a threat to nuclear proliferation as foreign agents steal their fuel?

As a start, Rolls could probably do worse than check out the choices on Wikipedia for free. As usual the encyclopaedia huffs and puffs about the advantages and disadvantages, but it does reveal that only two have actually been built and are operating in Russia and China respectively. Three more are under construction in China and Russia, while a fourth is being built in Argentina. Oddly, those under construction do not appear to be the same design as the ones already built, which was supposed to be the point of it all. Four other designs, including one in the UK, have been archived, while there are some 39 other different designs to choose from. Given that Rolls have a design of their own for a 470 MW reactor, which is a little big for mass production, it would be worth a few quid to bet on the design they will eventually chose, namely a smaller one similar to their own. But looking at the sheer range of different coolant and safety options, it might be suggested that the SMR has been the nuclear engineer’s holy grail for a very long time, without much actual progress.

A similar distance from actuality comes with carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS). The Department of Business and Trade recently pronounced on its website that: “The UK has a global leading geological advantage of any country in the world – the UK Continental Shelf accounts for approximately 25% of Europe’s CO2 storage potential and can safely store 78 billion tonnes of CO2.” Well, we had better get on with it then, since at the moment we are storing…well, not to put too fine a point on it about bugger all.

It is not that we don’t have expertise on this. The UK Carbon Capture and Storage (UKCCS) community has some 300 academic members working on the geology and technology. 5D Net Zero consultancy gives detailed analysis of CO2 production all around the world. Worley, one of the world leaders on carbon capture has a base here and is advising on the low-carbon output Vertex hydrogen plant in Ellesmere Port. By comparison, the Norwegians have already signed contracts for the disposal of 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 in their Northern Lights project, funded by Total, Equinox and Shell. Meanwhile, the IEA has pointed out that if we want to get to our targets in 2030, we need to store 1,286 million tonnes of CO2 and we are currently storing around 44 million globally.

What is perhaps equally odd is the UK Government’s apparent obsession with hydrogen. If you produce hydrogen by electrolysis of water you will need about 48 to 50 kWh of renewable electricity to produce around 1 kg of hydrogen. If you burn 1 kg of hydrogen to generate CO2-free electricity, you will produce about 16 kWh, or to be blunt, you will be wasting around two-thirds of the renewable electricity, which you could use directly. This does not mean that hydrogen does not have a major use to balance out the production of power from large solar or wind capacity, when the sun does not shine or the wind dies down. Equally 1 kg of hydrogen actually contains as much energy as a gallon of gasoline, but it needs compression to be useful in vehicles.

Basically, hydrogen fuelled cars run on fuel cells and they have the huge advantage that they can be refuelled extremely quickly under pressure and far faster than the chronic inconvenience of the five minutes required to reload with gasoline. The disadvantage is that there are very few filling stations in the UK and to create a network would require a huge amount of capital. Given the current fuss about recharging stations for battery-driven cars already, this does not seem to be good idea. Hydrogen as a vehicle fuel is best left to buses and trucks, with regular circular routes and depots.

Of course, what the government apparently wants to do is to produce ‘blue’ hydrogen with CCUS, probably from methane, via steam-reforming at a temperature of 700° to 1000° C and syphon off the CO2 by capturing it and storing it. The ambition is to produce enough hydrogen that by 2030 it will provide “enough clean electricity to power all of London for a year.”  Well good luck with that mate, and if you are going to steam-reform methane at such temperatures and capture the carbon, why not just burn the methane anyway and capture the carbon from that?

Naturally the ultra greenies think that carbon capture is a complete waste of time and that hydrogen is somehow the great white hope of the oil industry and their last conspiracy to destroy the planet. Given that the objective is reducing greenhouse gases and the UK currently uses around 1.2 million barrels of oil every day, it is in fact very difficult to see how the CO2 in the air over the country can be reduced without carbon storage. Equally making hydrogen from methane is hardly a money spinner.

The government will “accelerate” the growth of renewable energy, but in the current political climate they could hardly say anything else. Things might be a little happier if the UK had any indigenous large manufacturer of either solar panels or large wind turbine blades, but it doesn’t. Much the same can be said about our drive towards electric vehicles. Leaving the EU has put a small bomb under UK car makers who in 2022 produced the lowest number of new cars since 1956, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.

Honda shutting Swindon was not blamed by them on the UK’s departure from the EU, but the EU was at minimum the reason why it originally started here. Since then, BMW have switched their electric mini production to China. Either way the EU’s rules of origin have greatly complicated sales of British cars to Europe and the industry is widely held to be in crisis. This is not to say that British vehicle manufacturing is going to disappear, but merely to point out that it is not in a good place to get capital to switch wholesale into electric vehicles, in spite of demands that they do so. Even more discouraging is the long running saga of battery production for these new vehicles.

In this regard, Britishvolt, with plans to build a “Gigafactory” for electric vehicle batteries in Blyth, Northumberland, got about as far as clearing the land before collapsing owing a debt of £120 million in January 2023. Bought by an Australian company, Recharge Industries, this buyer is now in dispute with the administrator EY – Ernst and Young as was – over, of all things, the cost of an electricity connection to the grid. EY have problems of their own, being banned from the audit of German companies for two years because of involvement in Wirecard’s global fraud. Where this will go is anybody’s guess, but it does not bode well for the UK government’s desire to ban fossil fuel cars by 2030, or at least for their replacement with UK built vehicles.

At least the government have given themselves an extra five years to entirely change the way British home heating and hot water are provided. It is the ambition to phase out all new and replacement gas boilers by 2035. By that time British homes will be heated by “British electricity and not by imported gas”. Quite who is going to pay for this exercise remains unclear, but under the price cap, UK gas prices are 10.3 pence per kWh, while electricity prices are around 34.1 pence per kWh. Add in the fact that some 65%-75% of British homes are heated by gas and this exercise is going to cause a lot of upheaval. It also assumes that all this electricity is going to come from green sources, which when you add in all those electric vehicles means that green power production is going to have to go through the roof, whoever pays for it.

Meanwhile the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme is there to remind the government that it actually has some responsibility for public buildings, notably schools and hospitals. It has In the past – via Salix, a government owned company – done some considerable work on funding decarbonisation programmes. Yet it has recently been cut back to a mere £17 million in funding. While this money is triumphantly noted in “Powering up Britain”, what has not been noted is that it has been severely reduced and that the Department of Education has been warning the Treasury that many schools are in a state of chronic disrepair. Many were built in the 1960s of aerated cement and contain asbestos, while spending on school infrastructure has fallen by 50% since 2010. Consequently, claiming the credit for a small amount of money offered for their decarbonisation is mendacity of a pretty high order.

One has to guess that the aviation industry, faced by extinction from young travellers who care about their carbon footprint, have at least banged a few drums in Whitehall. The Advanced Fuel Fund has actually managed to extract £165 million from the UK Treasury and furthermore has actually managed to spend some of it. Around £54 million is to go to three plants in Teeside, Immingham and Ellesmere Port to make Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAR) from black bin bags. Further money is to go to turning steel-mill and power plant waste gases into a version of jet-kerosene.

“From black bin bags”, the Department of Transport phrase, is a bit of a misnomer. Velocys are actually going to take commercial, industrial and consumer waste and using the sophisticated Fischer-Tropsch process turn it into 20 million gallons of SAR, saving, they claim, 300,000 tonnes of CO2 a year. It needs to be pointed out that SAR does not actually stop CO2 coming out of the tailpipe of the average passenger aircraft. The saving is in the life cycle of the fuel. However before throwing hands in the air, it has to be remembered that some 150 million tonnes of greenhouse gases some from the EU’s waste tips every year, so turning some of this waste into aviation fuel makes a lot of sense. The aim is to cut aviation emissions by 50%, but there is a hell of a long way to go, since SAR probably now accounts for around 1.5% of the 57 billion gallons currently being used.

At least the Advanced Fuel Fund does show that the UK Government is actually prepared to support some British companies in worthwhile investment. But what grates about the “Powering up Britain” document is its triumphant claims to be actually doing a very great deal to increase Britain’s energy security and tackling climate change when the money mentioned is actually spread over years and is not that much. Whatever else it is, it is not a “blueprint for the future of energy in this country”. For a start, it might be sensible to make solar panels mandatory on new-build housing.

The trouble with reporting on energy and climate change is defining what is real, what is aspirational and what is just plain implausible. One of the recent delights in this regard is the wonderful tale of Trevor Milton, who disguised an enormous Ford truck as being built by his Nikola Motors and stated that it was running on hydrogen. The company was rewarded by a gigantic share price increase, when it produced a movie showing the truck racing along a road at full speed. It was in fact free-wheeling and the camera had been tilted by 20% to avoid revealing the slope. He made a fortune and now awaits sentencing. There is a lot of it about.