Anyone looking to upgrade their boiler in the next few years will have inevitably heard a lot of often contradictory advice about what they should do when their existing boiler becomes unviable to service and maintain.
Ultimately, right now the advice is simply to upgrade your existing boiler, which will ensure that your home is efficiently and economically heated for at least the next decade and beyond whilst the future of heating is determined.
A current, recently installed and serviced gas boiler installed in your home would already be able to support the proposed 20 per cent hydrogen gas blend that would be mixed into the existing gas supply and does not need to be “hydrogen ready” to accomplish this.
Similarly, whilst heat pumps are a popular option and if the Future Homes Framework is not amended becomes the primary option for new-build homes, they are also exceptionally expensive to retrofit at present, meaning that boilers are likely to remain popular if not ubiquitous for at least the next decade.
However, the incorporation of hydrogen does lead to a lot of confusion, as there are a lot of different types of hydrogen gas that are discussed, including the recently coined gold hydrogen, causing confusion about what each colour represents.
In practice, any type of hydrogen gas in the 20 per cent blend will work with your boiler, and once hydrogen-ready or 100 per cent hydrogen boilers enter the market, any type of hydrogen will work with them too.
However, that is not to say that different hydrogen types will not have an effect on new boilers, but it will be noticed more in your bills than in your radiators.
Amazing Technicolour Hydrogen
Hydrogen is the most plentiful chemical in the universe, found in water, petrol and throughout our bodies and the bodies of every animal and vegetable in existence. Hydrogen is everywhere, and hydrogen gas can be burned to create a potent heat and fuel source.
How usable hydrogen gas is produced, however, can vary significantly, and affect its role in boilers, how it might be affected by any potential future carbon regulations and the cost and ease of access to its supply.
This is usually expressed through a colour code, of which there are a total of eight, even if only three or four are widely used outside of specific industries.
At present, the most common forms of hydrogen gas production rely on natural gas, which is known alternatively as grey and blue hydrogen.
Both forms of hydrogen gas are created the same way through a process known as steam reformation. The difference between the two is that blue hydrogen uses a process known as carbon capture and storage to reduce the levels of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere.
A related albeit rarer process to this is turquoise hydrogen, which is created through pyrolysis, where methane is heated in an inert atmosphere, splitting methane into hydrogen and carbon black, a form of solid carbon.
Brown or black hydrogen is the result of the gasification of coal, and although the terms are often used interchangeably, black hydrogen is typically used when the source fuel is black coal whilst brown hydrogen is when lignite is used.
Green hydrogen is typically defined as hydrogen generated through electrolysis, where an electrical current is used to separate the oxygen and hydrogen molecules in water.
Whilst currently one of the rarest forms of hydrogen gas on the market, it has the potential to be 100 per cent carbon neutral if the electricity generated also comes from green sources.
Rather confusingly, purple, pink or red hydrogen refers to one of several ways nuclear power can be used to generate hydrogen, either by powering an electrolysis process, through water-splitting processes or through the intense steam produced through the generation of nuclear power that can be used in the steam reforming of methane.
A much rarer form of hydrogen gas is yellow hydrogen, which can either mean hydrogen produced through a mix of fossil fuel-derived electricity and renewable sources, or the use of solar photovoltaics, although this latter definition often intersects with green hydrogen.
Finally, there is white or gold hydrogen, which is the use of hydrogen found in underground reservoirs and generated naturally within the earth itself, with an article by the Financial Times claiming there could be as much as 5tn tonnes globally.
These different sources can be confusing but they all ultimately work as the same fuel in either dedicated boilers or conventional boilers as part of a blend, and the effect will most likely be found in the price of energy.