GRIFFEN 2024 | 7 was in the army for 30 years, before leaving to work in the nuclear industry. After ten years, I moved to hydrogen. It is great to be at the forefront of a technology that not only has momentum and business support behind it, but one that is working toward the challenge that is ‘Net Zero’. The difficult thing with energy is trying to store it. Batteries are hugely inefficient in terms of volume and capacity and their production requires many rare earth metals. Hydrogen, however, can perform a balancing function. If electricity is produced at night when it is not necessarily needed, how do we store it? One of the answers may be to use it to produce hydrogen. What is the most pressing environmental issue? The rise in temperature. We are not going to be able to keep the temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius and that is a real problem. The world is 4.6 billion years old and if you equate that to 46 years, postindustrial climate change has taken one minute. In that minute, we have destroyed something like 50% of the planet. What are the challenges you foresee in the energy industry? The greatest challenge for the energy industry is the production of primary energy. How are we going to generate the energy that we need without pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? What is your take on environmental pressure groups? I can understand why they feel the way they do. But in order to achieve reform, we need the resources of the major oil and gas companies. Without contribution from the private sector into new technologies and innovation, we will not find the solutions we seek. One example is the plummeting cost of offshore wind energy production as a result of the innovative technological solutions that have been discovered. It would not have been possible without the commercial imperative. What are some misconceptions about hydrogen? In the first instance, safety. It is not a technology that is well understood. The only thing people think of is the Hindenburg disaster of 1937. But what people need to realise is, for example, that the hydrocarbon-based fuels used in aeroplanes are incredibly flammable, but the systems used today are so safe that passenger aircrafts are refuelled with people onboard. The industry has learnt to manage it and it will do the same with hydrogen. None of these technologies are going to appear at the flick of a switch. There will have to be a certain amount of grey (nonlow carbon) hydrogen produced in order to make the hydrogen transition work, simply because we cannot access the range of new technologies in a single step. Long-haul aircrafts are going to be burning hydrocarbon fuel until the end of the century, albeit at increasingly reduced volumes. What are the benefits and drawbacks of nuclear power? The benefits of nuclear power are enormous. There is a massive energy density, so you can create a huge amount of energy from a relatively small footprint, without producing any carbon dioxide emissions. But, it is fair to say storing the spent fuel is a real challenge and current thinking centres on deep geological disposal. In the case of Hinkley Point C, as with all new stations, it will be decommissioned at the end of its life by the developer, or by the owners of the power station, using a fund that was set aside from the beginning and is factored into the strike price. In previous generations, the costs fell on the government to pick up the tab. Bottom Line There is not a single silver bullet that is going to resolve all of the problems that the energy sector faces, but a combination of technologies is the way forward. We will need nuclear, renewables, heat pumps, hydrogen, indeed a mixture of everything you can think of to enable the energy transition away from fossil fuels as 2050 races upon us. I An Interview with David Eccles (1975) David Eccles during his cycling trip from Somerset to Istanbul.
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