Stop the fixation on electric cars and give alternative fuels, like hydrogen, a chance in 2025

The UK should follow the lead of the European Union, and announce that we’ll match its commitment to at least one hydrogen filling station located every 120 miles on major roads.

The EU deadline to achieve that is 2031; here in the UK, policy makers don’t support any role for green hydrogen apart from using it to decarbonise heavy industrial processes like steel-making. If nothing changes, we’ll be watching enviously from the sidelines as firms from Germany and Asia roll out new-generation hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicles in the coming years. 

The UK’s exclusive focus on battery-powered electric vehicles looks increasingly like tunnel vision, the closer we get to the deadlines. It ignores other low-carbon technologies for road transport being pursued actively elsewhere too, including bio and e-fuels. 

The trouble starts with the Government asking mandarins for policies that drive the UK to net zero fastest, resulting in the planet’s most challenging targets for EV conversion. But in the real world outside Whitehall, consumers clearly aren’t so single-minded. Other countries supporting alternative green road fuels alongside battery EVs have the benefit of eggs in more than one basket, and any technologies which could help to make the net zero transition smoother – and more realistically achieved – need to be actively supported.

UK policy on hydrogen is that diverting any of the currently low global supplies of the genuinely ‘green’ stuff away from the furnaces of heavy industry to road transport would be inefficient use of a scarce low carbon resource.

It seems to me astonishingly short-sighted, when so much cash is being pledged for renewable hydrogen production and storage projects around the globe.

Here's everything you need to know about hydrogen cars...