💡The hydrogen economy

What will it take to scale hydrogen in order to reach net zero in the UK

Hi, it’s Diana Fox Carney here. 

Reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 80% in the UK is a huge challenge. To achieve this, we need to increase electrification massively, improve energy efficiency across the board, phase out petrol and diesel vehicles (by 2040 at the latest), change our diets and land use, begin to deploy bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (CCS), and plant many  more trees (increasing from about 10k to 27k hectares of planting per year). 

We’ve covered almost all of these areas in our previous briefings, which you can revisit here. 

Achieving  100% reduction – the legally-mandated net zero by 2050 – requires significantly greater effort. We will need to adopt negative-emissions technologies (such as direct air carbon capture and the increased use of wood in construction materials) and we need to find technologies that can address many of the stubborn issues we face when seeking zero-carbon solutions to problems such as powering heavy transport; heating homes t…