News / SIC hydrogen fuel study
SHETLAND Islands Council is to carry out a study looking into opportunities to develop projects involving hydrogen – described as “one of the fuels of the future” – in the islands.
Economic development project manager Maurice Henderson is to examine projects elsewhere in the UK and Scandinavia to see if there is potential to reduce carbon emissions and boost the Shetland economy.
The local authority is already supporting a scheme by the Unst Partnership, which has obtained government funding for its plan to turn wind and other renewables into commercial quantities of hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen.
During Wednesday’s development committee meeting, councillor Frank Robertson said other countries, most notably Iceland, were looking very seriously at hydrogen as a fuel for transport and fishing fleets.
“It will be one of the fuels of the future,” he said. “Do you see that tying in with the prospect of wind farm developments and particularly tidal developments?”
Henderson said there could be potential for community-scale wind projects off the main power grid to be used to generate hydrogen power.
“There could be opportunities there and this [study] is a case of highlighting those opportunities… so I think it’s worthwhile reviewing at this stage,” he said.
It will also look at how hydrogen may be able to link into projects to store energy, “stationary” generation of electricity and heat, transport uses, and the prospect of attracting external funding for such projects.
Councillor Michael Stout said he was “personally very enthusiastic about this” and called for a “joined-up” approach within the local authority.
He said electric ferries had already been developed and some developments that were “cutting edge” not long ago are “already quite mainstream”.
For instance, in Aberdeen a dozen buses are running on hydrogen – albeit “brown hydrogen” (run off the main electricity grid) rather than cleaner “green hydrogen” (drawn from carbon-free sources).
“This is not about committing ourselves to spending lots of money,” Stout added. “It’s about making sure we’re not being left behind.”
Robertson said: “This generation must realise that… power and energy is going to be the single most important factor facing future generations of Shetland as the oil runs out or gets more expensive.”
Development committee chairman Alastair Cooper cautioned that hydrogen was a “volatile substance”, and the technology “needs to move on quite a bit”, but he agreed it was important “to be at the forefront of knowing what’s going on”.
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