The H21 series of projects shows how the U.K. could switch from natural gas to hydrogen

October 13, 2021 | Case Study

The average household in the U.K. consumes 12,000 kWh of natural gas annually for cooking, heating, and hot tap water. This leads to annual emissions of 62 million tons of CO₂, or 17% of the country's total greenhouse gas emissions in 2019. Decarbonizing the built environment is a difficult problem to solve in most European countries, where natural gas is the staple energy carrier for households. At the very least, it requires replacing all of the heating and cooking equipment in all households. The available choices are either full electrification or replacing natural gas with hydrogen, or extensive use of district heating networks. All of these choices involve major investments in the energy infrastructure, either by tripling the capacity of the electric grid, by converting the natural gas network to carry hydrogen, or by building new district heating networks and securing the heat sources needed for it.

In 2015, a consortium of U.K. regional gas distribution system operators set out to investigate the feasibility of converting the entire U.K. natural gas distribution network to hydrogen and converting all U.K. household gas consumption to hydrogen. This led to the H21 series of projects, conducted with the Leeds Beckett University. The series of projects is one of the main inputs into the U.K. hydrogen strategy launched in the summer of 2021.