The International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) has just released the paper ‘Hydrogen for heating? Decarbonisation options for households in the United Kingdom in 2050’.
In the study, the ICCT has projected the costs for a typical single-family UK household in 2050 using low-GHG or GHG-neutral hydrogen, renewable electricity or a combination of both.
They look at hydrogen produced via steam-methane reforming (SMR) combined with CCS and electrolysis using zero-carbon renewable electricity, and a heat pump only and hybrid heat pump (with an auxiliary hydrogen boiler for cold spells) scenario.
The results show that both stand-alone and hybrid heat pumps are lower-cost solutions than hydrogen-only technologies. Their analysis shows that stand alone heat pumps are 50% less expensive than using a boiler with SMR + CCS hydrogen. This does not include the costs for a better thermal insulation of buildings, but the cost of hybrid heat pumps is also still 30% less expensive than using a hydrogen boiler.
You can find below two figures showing (i) the annual household costs and CO2 intensity of the different heating options and (ii) the cost components of the heating pathways (to note that the ICCT has not considered the impacts of heat demand on large-scale electricity infrastructure in their analysis).
