The UK government is failing to deliver balanced support towards clean energy technologies ahead of its carbon neutrality ambitions, according to hydrogen solutions manufacturer ITM Power.

Company chief executive Graham Cooley told Kallanish in an exclusive video interview that green hydrogen development is yet to receive incentives from the government, as opposed to blue hydrogen and even diesel.

“The UK government’s strategy is a combined strategy: blue hydrogen and green hydrogen, but when they selected projects to feed studies in the cluster decarbonisation call, they funded all blue hydrogen projects. And today there hasn’t been a single large-scale, industrial green hydrogen project [publicly] funded in the UK. So it’s a question of the government putting their money where their mouth is, frankly,” he says.

Britain announced in August its hydrogen strategy aimed at kick starting a “world-leading hydrogen economy,” unlocking £4 billion ($5.45 billion) in investment and creating over 9,000 jobs by 2030. The so-called twin track approach will see the UK relying on both fossil fuel-based and renewable-based hydrogen production to reach its 5-gigawatt capacity target by 2030.

The government is yet to disclose details on the development roadmap, but to date what’s confirmed is that it will provide $105m in funding to support “polluting industries,” while also consulting on the design of a £240m Net Zero Hydrogen Fund. Funding includes £55m towards the Industrial Fuel Switching Competition; £40m for the Red Diesel Replacement Competition; and £10m for the Industrial Energy Efficiency Accelerator.

“The market is moving incredibly quickly, but not in the UK,” he adds, noting that there are large-scale electrolyser projects being developed worldwide, with 200 gigawatts of capacity in the pipeline. Around 85% of them are in Europe.

Cooley claims the UK government “has put more than 30 times as much money into a plug-in infrastructure as they have at hydrogen refuelling infrastructure. We haven’t even got started.” He points out that there’s no Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) in the country for green hydrogen and that “even though green hydrogen today is very cost-competitive per mile with diesel, the UK government still subsidises diesel for buses and does not subsidise green hydrogen.”

The inconsistency in incentives and subsidies is described by the ceo as “astonishing.”

When questioned on whether blue hydrogen would work as a bridge fuel towards green hydrogen, Cooley was emphatic in saying: “blue hydrogen is oil and gas business as usual,” pointing out to its carbon footprint issues and “massive capital schemes” relating to existing infrastructure. In his views, there are significant problems with carbon capture and storage technologies and methane leaks in several stages of blue hydrogen production, storage and distribution.

“Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. You don’t need to make the CO2 at all. You just use green hydrogen, right from the beginning and you scale up technology that you’re ultimately going to need to use,” he says. “And that is, I think, increasingly understood now in industry.”

The Sheffield-based company owns and operates the largest electrolyser manufacturing factory in the world. It has recently delivered, through a partnership with Linde, Europe’s biggest PEM electrolyser at Shell’s Rheinland refinery, in Germany. Together with its consortium partners, ITM Power will now work on a 10-fold scale up with the Refhyne II 100-megawatt electrolyser set to be delivered and commissioned in 2024.