The development and deployment of technology for green hydrogen production will be key to enabling the UK to achieve its net zero ambitions writes Jon Excell
Whilst much has been made of UK engineering’s response to the Covid-19 crisis, there’s a growing sense that this impressive mobilisation of the manufacturing base is merely a dress-rehearsal for an even more daunting challenge: reducing the UK’s carbon emissions to nothing by 2050.
Because whilst politicians and businesses across the economy will all have a role to play, the quest to meet the net zero emissions targets that are enshrined in British law is first and foremost an engineering challenge that will require unprecedented levels of innovation in almost every area of energy technology: from carbon capture and storage, to modular nuclear reactors, battery technology, offshore wind, solar and more.

There is, quite clearly, no silver bullet. But one energy source that’s considered an increasingly vital component of this low carbon future, and in which the UK is very well-placed to develop a competitive edge, is hydrogen.
Abundant, versatile, energy dense and clean at point of use, hydrogen has long attracted a vocal band of evangelists, who have trumpeted the gas’ potential for heating our homes, fuelling our transport and generally reshaping our energy economy.
The problem is that the bulk of the hydrogen currently used is so-called “brown hydrogen” derived from fossil fuels using processes that the International Energy Authority (IEA) says is responsible for around 830 million tonnes of CO2 emissions per year.
Clearly, if it’s to truly deliver on its undoubted potential, cleaner methods of production are essential, and the quest to develop this missing part of the jigsaw is a major driver of innovation.

Initially, this is likely to fuel greater investment in blue hydrogen production, where carbon capture and storage (CCS) is used to capture the CO2 produced by existing processes.
But it’s the developments in green hydrogen production – using giant renewably powered electrolysers to extract hydrogen from water – that are perhaps most exciting of all.
Hydrogen produced in this way could – it’s claimed – play a key role in decarbonising industrial processes, domestic heating and transport, whilst offering an elegant method of storing excess renewable energy.
One of the UK’s pioneers of green hydrogen production is Sheffield based electrolyser manufacturer ITM power, which produces scaleable modular PEM (polymer electrolyte membrane) electrolyser systems for a range of applications.

The company – which is in the process of moving into a new 1GW per annum facility claimed to be the largest of its kind in the world – is perhaps best known for its network of renewably powered hydrogen filling stations which can be found on Shell forecourts around the UK. But it’s now also involved in a number of major projects exploring the feasibility of green hydrogen production for industrial applications.
One of the key initiatives here is Gigastack, an ITM led project, that has received £7.5m funding through the UK government’s hydrogen supply competition to explore how the costs of electrolytic hydrogen for industrial use could be reduced.
The project is exploring the development of a system that will use electricity from Orsted’s Hornsea Two 1.4 GW offshore wind farm to power giant electrolysers at a substation in Humberside that will in turn generate renewable hydrogen for the Phillips 66 refinery.
ITM has already developed designs for a modular 5MW electrolyser stack as part of initial feasibility study and as part of the second phase will conduct a front end engineering study on the development and integration of a 100MW electrolyser made of up 20MW modules.

The company is also involved in an effort to build what will be the world’s largest PEM electrolyser at Shell’s Rhinleand Refinery in Wesseling, Germany.
The five year REFHYNE project which kicked off in 2018, will see a 10MW electrolyser, consisting of two 5MW modules, integrated into refinery processes such as desulphurisation and hydrocracking. The system is expected to supply around 1300 tonnes of hydrogen per year, which is around one per cent of the plant’s annual hydrogen needs.
Once up and running, the facility will become the largest green hydrogen production facility in the world, overtaking the 6MW H2Future plant at steelmaker Voestalpine’s site in Linz, Austria.
For ITM CEO Graham Cooley the opportunities presented by this market alone are huge: “The biggest initial opportunity is decarbonising the existing market for hydrogen,” he told The Engineer. “If you just decarbonise 10 per cent of the hydrogen used in refineries that is a market size of 90 billion Euros.”
But whilst ITM Power is primarily focused on driving the market through industrial applications, others – such as JCB heir Jo Bamford – are concentrating on different markets.
Owner of green hydrogen production company Ryse and UK bus manufacturer Wrightbus, Bamford recently outlined an ambitious plan to use buses to catalsye the UK’s hydrogen economy.
Wrightbus has already supplied a number of hydrogen fuel cell powered buses around the UK and is poised to deliver a fleet of 20 vehicles to Transport for London. But Bamford has ambitions to scale this up rapidly, and earlier this summer unveiled a “fully-costed” vision on how the private sector and government can work together to to bring 3,000 hydrogen buses to the streets of the UK by 2024.
There are so many different variables around getting hydrogen going, but in essence you need volume and a captive customer
Jo Bamford – Ryse / Wrightbus
Under his plans, these new buses along with five new zero-emission hydrogen production plants dotted around the UK coast will be used to kick start the UK’s hydrogen economy and create thousands of new jobs. Ryse has already applied for planning permission to build the first of these at a site near Herne Bay in Kent, where it will be powered by electricity from Vattenfall’s Kentish flats offshore wind farm and use electrolysis technology supplied by Norwegian firm Nel Hydrogen.
Calling on the government to set aside 10 per cent of its National Bus Strategy fund for hydrogen Bamford said: “You have to start somewhere, there are so many different variables around getting hydrogen going, but in essence you need volume and a captive customer – and if you’ve got 200 buses coming back to a bus depot every night to be filled up you can get it going.”
Whilst Bamford plans to usher in the hydrogen economy via heavy transport, other projects currently in the pipeline are focused on producing green hydrogen for the gas grid.
One such initiative is the recently launched NortH2 project, a project involving Shell, Groningen Seaports and Dutch gas network operator Gasunie that will see a new “mega offshore wind farm” in the North sea feed a giant hydrogen production facility in the Netherlands seaport of Eemshaven. Green hydrogen produced at the site will be transported along existing gas infrastructure to customers throughout Northwest Europe.
The project’s ambition is to generate around 3 to 4GW of offshore wind energy by 2030, and as much as 10GW by 2040. Depending on the outcome of an ongoing feasibility study, the consortium hopes to produce first hydrogen by 2027.
Whilst NortH2 will be carrying electrolysis on shore, other efforts are taking a slightly different approach by exploring how existing offshore infrastructure could be adapted and used to carry out production.
Led by Dutch exploration and production company Neptune Energy the PosHYydon project plans to demonstrate how hydrogen could be produced on existing oil and gas platforms using electricity generated by offshore wind.
The project will see the installation of a green hydrogen production facility on Neptune Energy’s Q13a platform, an electrified oil and gas platform in the North Sea just off the coast of Scheveningen in the Netherlands.

Seawater will be pumped into containerised units on the platform, where it will be desalinated and then fed into an electrolyser.
The facility will receive green electricity by cable from the shore but will simulate generation from the nearby Luchterduinen offshore windfarm. It’s expected to produce approximately 3000 – 4000 Nm3 / day of H2 for the Gasunie grid.
Neptune Energy’s Patrice Hijsterborg told The Engineer that the aim of the two year project is to demonstrate how hydrogen production could represent a sustainable future for oil and gas platforms that are nearing the end of their lives. “Neptune wants to demonstrate that H2 can be handled and treated on a live, producing oil & gas platform,” he said. “The long term view is that Neptune gas infrastructure can be utilised for offshore renewable energy, and therefore share cost with producing our relatively low carbon North Sea gas.”
Meanwhile, the UK led ERM Dolphyn project is going one step further, and looking at producing green hydrogen from electrolyser units directly coupled to floating wind turbines situated far out at sea.
Led by environmental consultant ERM, the project has received £3.12m from the government’s hydrogen Supply programme and, following the completion of an initial proof of concept, is now entering its next phase.

Project director, ERM partner Kevin Kinsella explained that the team is currently focused on getting an initial 2MW unit up and running in a consented area around 20km off the coast of Aberdeen, followed by a 10MW unit pre commercial unit at the same location. The ultimate aim is deploy a 4GW array of floating wind turbines in the North Sea by the early 2030s.
Whilst hydrogen generated by the initial units will be exported to the shore via a three-inch diameter flexible pipe, Kinsella said that the larger commercial scale field will most likely connect into an existing repurposed offshore pipeline.
There’s no reason at all why, by the end of the century, the whole of UK heat couldn’t be provided by green hydrogen from offshore North Sea wind
Kevin Kinsella – ERM Dolphyn project director
Explaining the decision to directly couple the electrolysis to the turbine, Kinsella said that the team initially explored a number of options, such as bringing power back to a centralised platform with electrolysers before piping hydrogen back to shore, or performing electrolysis onshore, but went for direct coupling as it avoids the need for expensive cables, switchgear, and grid connections. “It’s a much cheaper way of doing it over long distances and you don’t get the energy losses that you do with bringing it back electrically,” he said.
Freeing the system from the constraints of grid connectivity also makes it easier to build further out to sea where the wind resource is more plentiful, and it’s possible to build large scale installations without impacting shipping routes or raising environmental concerns.
Kinsella said that a 4GW Dolphyn array could produce enough hydrogen to heat 1.5 million homes, and could ultimately transform the UK’s energy landscape. “There’s no reason at all why, by the end of the century, the whole of UK heat couldn’t be provided by green hydrogen from offshore North Sea wind”, he said.
It’s a tantalising vision, and one which is well within the UK’s grasp, not least thanks to the wealth of expertise and infrastructure that can be found in its offshore oil and gas industry.
President of the Energy Institute and former UK National Grid boss Steve Holliday told The Engineer that the sector’s buy-in will be crucial. “The only way we’re going to ensure the world has energy supplies, and at the same time making sure we’re cleaning our energy up…. is with the huge engineering, scientific and financial strength of the oil and gas industry,” he said. “They have a huge part to play. And this particular topic is just another example of where they can bring all of those skills and experiences to bear.”
Oil and Gas UK policy manager Will Webster, agreed that the sector has an important role to play and that green hydrogen could represent a major opportunity as we-transition to a zero carbon economy. “Many energy transition technologies are an opportunity for existing oil and gas businesses,” he said. “Offshore wind (fixed and floating), carbon capture and hydrogen are all areas which have transferable skills and expertise from the offshore oil and gas sector including project management, safety disciplines, operations, subsurface data analysis and logistics”
In Holliday’s view, what’s required now is some serious government intervention aimed at ensuring the sector has the best possible chance of delivering on its promise. “It feels to me a little like the world we were in a decade ago with zero carbon solar and wind,” he said. “We needed to kickstart those industries in the UK with incentives and those incentives worked. Offshore wind’s a perfect example. You were looking 3 /4 years ago at £140 /MW of offshore wind and now they’re coming in at the high £30s. We’re going to need to incentivise some scaling up of green hydrogen in order to bring the costs of that technology down to a level that means it’s going to be economic and logical to tie it in with the wind and the solar.”
This is an opportunity not just on our own journey to net zero in the UK but to actually create some industry that is very competitive and can be exported around the world
Steve Holliday – President, Energy Institute
Echoing the call for incentivisation, Jo Bamford called on the government to prioritise hydrogen over other more crowded fields of energy technology, such as batteries. “Every country in the world is going to come out of the crisis with plans to revitalise their own economy and every single one of those plans is going to be around how to do we make it green. And if every single one of them is going to chase batteries, it looks like a crowded field to me. As a businessman you go somewhere where you can compete and come out on top. There are far less people chasing hydrogen.”
There’s certainly a strong sense that the technology plays to many of the UK’s existing strengths: “We’ve got a massive renewable resource on our doorstep which is great advantage for us,” said Steve Holliday “This is an opportunity not just on our own journey to net zero in the UK but to actually create some industry that is very competitive and can be exported around the world.”
Indeed, in the form of ITM Power, the UK is already home to one of the world’s biggest electrolyser manufacturers, something which ITM’s Graham Cooley believes deserves a little more recognition. “We don’t have the world’s largest battery factory, we don’t have the world’s largest heat pump factory , we don’t have the largest solar cell producer and we don’t have the world’s largest wind turbine blade manufacturer – what we do have is the world’s largest electrolyser factory in Sheffield. And we ought to be singing from the rooftops about that!”
ERM’s Kevin Kinsella agreed with the positive outlook. “We’re in the best position in Europe, having the best wind resources by far. We have a leading offshore oil and gas industry and offshore wind industry, supported by the best supply chain in Europe, and all of the technical resources and knowhow to deliver it. With Net Zero by 2050 written into UK law, this is a fantastic opportunity for the oil and gas industry to transition smoothly from fossil fuels to green energy, using the same skills and resources, and at the same time become a net exporter of green energy to Europe.”
Why not cut out the undersea cable and carry out the electolysis out at sea, carrying the H2 in ships to the point of sale – which could be local or anywhere in the world. In the UK, H2 can be stored in the gas network to start with – natural gas (methane) can be mixed with up to 10% H2 at the moment but ultimately H2 could replace the methane completely (with a suitable change to boiler and cooker jets and to the charging).
The undersea cable is a substantial part of the construction cost but more importantly is a serious security risk either from natural disasters (most earthquakes are underwater) but more importantly from action by hostile actors. Offshore fields generally only have one substantial cable supply so instantaneous loss is not only a shock to the power supply but could result in overspeed damage to many turbines.
As we report, a number of projects are indeed looking at directly coupling electrolysis to offshore turbines (i.e. carrying it out at sea) and piggybacking / repurposing existing offshore infrastructure rather than installing new pipelines etc.
The production of H2 at sea is a bad idea. All the HV cables can be replaced with steel pipe, if you simply remove the HAWT direct-drive generators and pump water with floating VAWTs mounted on a simple WEC, equipped with energy storage. Put all the generators and electrolysis on dry land.
“We’ve got a massive renewable resource on our doorstep which is great advantage for us,” said Steve Holliday “This is an opportunity not just on our own journey to net zero in the UK but to actually create some industry that is very competitive and can be exported around the world.”
The nascent floating offshore wind industry would belong to us and become an economy-saving export, if Steve Holliday hadn’t run National Grid as a risk-averse money-making monopoly.
Okay, not entirely his fault, but the CEGB wasn’t risk-averse – it had a staff of 3,000, working on R&D. National Grid could have developed the energy storage technology we need, if they had done the necessary research in 2010. It would’ve cost very little, with tax credits.
The CEGB was working on windpower when it was closed down. The Danish government, and others, took the lead and never looked back – now look at the mess we’re in, paying out huge subsidies for the benefit of foreign business. It’s a tragedy of political maladministration.
The concept of the hydrogen economy is a flawed one on several elementary grounds: It depends entirely on undeveloped knowledge; viz. CCS and / or large-scale electrolysis, neither of which is proven at commercial scale. It uses far more energy to make hydrogen than burning fossil-fuels combined with CCS (if CCS can ever be economical). The popular argument that it can be made using the unusable off-peak wind energy, (that is at present curtailed at massive cost to the consumer), is a nonsense as high capital cost plant needs a substantial load factor to ever be economic.
When considering the best use of capital to reduce carbon dioxide formation, one should look at the products of energy as well as the production of energy. Most of the products imported by the UK are made in countries that have far higher CO2 production than us, if we penalised their products with a carbon tax (as is applied to UK producers of power) it would be of far greater benefit the UK industry than penalising it with high costs so that it cannot compete. It would also encourage re-shoring industries and improve security.
Jack Broughton you are missing the point to an extent. The whole idea is to generate hydrogen using renewable power. If it is not very efficient then so be it, the source of energy is effectively free apart from the machine to generate it. And as outlined also above off-shore power generation combined with an associated hydrogen plant offers a modular and secure means of generating hydrogen on a scaleable basis, especialy if it can re-purpose oil platforms. INitially demand will be small, but if you consider the medium to long term possible replacement of app 500TWh pa of fossil fuel then it makes far more economic sense. Hydrogen and fuel cells to replace IC engines retains the flexibility and adaptability of that mode of providing motive power with minimal wider social and economic consequences. If we moved the focus onto hydrogen instead of battery electric, which still requires that same amount of energy provision anyway then it is a win-win. Consider the cost of the grid infrastructure needed to deliver 3 or 400MWh of energy via charging a battery at thousands of outlets for hours on end, and the costs and problems with booking a slot at a charger!
Apologies – spotted now @jon in a paragraph! But the rationale must also be security of supply – the risk from hostile actors can only increase with time while the geological risk is constant and > 0.
There is another problem often associated with H2 which is storage, generally at high pressure as liquid H2 hence also at a very low temperature. This makes it difficult for applications in cars. The carbon nanotube approach eg by H2GoPower seems appropriate. Then of course is the cost of production and here, apart from renewable offshore energy, we should be looking at nuclear, both fission (SMR’s also burning the 112 tonnes of Pu at Sellafield into much shorter life waste) and fusion as per Tokamak Energy and/or First Light Fusion, both of which are looking promising years after Zeta and years before ITER. This way we could have complete energy independence and save the planet from complete disaster.
https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/resources/green-recovery-manifesto/
“Support direct government (or National Grid) contracting of interconnection, storage and DSR flexibility technologies.” – Such is the received ignorance – ignorant of the fact that National Grid is forbidden (by neoliberal edict – Act of Parliament) from being involved in either electricity storage or energy storage, because they’d be generating electricity and that’s NOT allowed!!
The nascent floating offshore wind industry would belong to us, be built with BGES and become an economy-saving export, if National Grid had invested in R&I ten years ago.
“Provide at least £1.8 billion per year over the next 3 years for . . coastal resilience projects”.
“Boost jobs in marine and coastal protection by providing £70 million per year.”
ALL that money and more should be targeted on Before-Generator Energy Storage for Marine Renewables, especially offshore wind, because it serves BOTH purposes.
You are right Jack – “high capital cost plant needs a substantial load factor to ever be economic.”
With cheap, green electricity available 24/7 from BGES, electrolysis could be run 24/7. Co-location with high-consumption industrial users would minimise the storage capacity for hydrogen.
@ John Logsdon.
ALL the HV cable could be removed from windfarms, if a radical new design is adopted. New sub-sea interconnectors (linking to PHES) will also become redundant when floating wind/wave pumps water ashore to land-based generators and electrolysis. Energy storage, BEFORE generator is an indispensable premise for engineering a sustainable, circular economy from RE harvest.
“producing green hydrogen from electrolysers that are directly coupled to floating wind turbines far out at sea.” is an ill-conceived idea that Ørsted is also working on!!
https://renews.biz/59563/orsted-promotes-hydrogen-production-in-turbine-towers/
NB: “This presents an opportunity to reduce overall costs, as hydrogen pipes cost less per km than power cables.” But you can bet your bottom dollar that Ørsted will never accept the disruptive switch from HAWTs on fixed foundations to floating VAWTs, which replaces thousands of miles of HV cable with cheap steel water pipes.
1GW of VAWT wind/wave, as close as possible to shore and generating firm, flexible electricity, would be cheaper too, both on CAPEX and O&M costs. e.g. 10-15 (50-75MW?) generators on dry land, instead of 100 top-heavy 10MW direct-drive HAWTs, 200m above the waves.
Hydrogen has some advantages for aircraft, at lease according to this article: ZeroAvia’s Val Miftakhov Makes a Compelling Case for Hydrogen Aviation (https://newatlas.com/aircraft/interview-zeroavia-val-miftakhov-hydrogen-aviation/). Just don’t put your wind farm right next to the airport.
I found another article, including a video of a fuel-cell airplane: https://chargedevs.com/newswire/zeroavia-completes-test-flight-of-fuel-cell-airplane/
You Brits seem to dominating fuel-cell aircraft. Bravo! More power to you.
Using electrolysis produces 8 tonnes of oxygen for every tonne of hydrogen. Some can be used in hospitals. Where the power comes from off-shore wind farms, the oxygen could be pumped intp the sea to counter eutrophication of sea water. (A lack of oxygen threatening sea -life – a growing international problem).
Interesting to read about this topic. Inevitable I guess. 38 years ago my undergraduate dissertation (part of my aeronautics course, supervised by the much missed Geoffrey Lilley) was on the subject of hydrogen as a fuel for aircraft in the year 2025(at the time driven more by the perceived lack of oil and the earlier oil crisis of the early 70s). Green as I was (in character as well as politics) I realised pretty soon that as an energy vector, rather than a primary energy source, it was the production of electricity that was key. Rather than my preferred solution of wind it was nuclear generation that looked like the only means of generating enough power (and that just for aircraft). This changed my politics and my attitude to so called limited resources (after all everything was going to run out…wasn’t it).
Hydrogen liquid as a fuel has too many issues – transportation and issues around transportation, liquefaction and as a liquid at least, on balance resulting in a low aerodynamic efficiency amongst other issues. The one interesting technology I recall was the use of metal hydrides for storage, the benefits outlined here https://www.fuelcellstore.com/blog-section/metal-hydrides-blog. Whether that could be applied to aircraft I’m not sure – but large amounts of R&D investments are surely required to find out.
My main concern with this article is the obsession with zero carbon (enshrined in UK law or not). This means that alternatives say around carbon sequestration and other avenues are not explored, limited by a blinkered narrow obsession about carbon from politicians who have run out of ideas rather than allowing engineers and scientists being able to explore how to adapt to a clean carbon based economy with undeniable benefits in terms of distribution being just one area (what happened to lean burn engines btw?). One day carbon as an energy source and vector may be supplanted – but as oil supplanted coal (and coal wood)- only when it is obviously better – not by influential people at root suffering guilt from being human.
Utopian dreams such as the hydrogen economy may make (some) westerners feel good (but hardly optimistic), but do people really think that the rest of the undeveloped economies can afford to wait until these dreams (probably never) become reality?
Good debate points are being made and it is good that the topic should be debated as major capital investments are needed if this is to progress. I would respond to Nick Cole’s critique that wind power is not free at all but is currently over 3 times more costly than fossil fuel generated electricity. There are people promising cheap wind power, but beware of such claims as they do not allow for the cost of non-reliability, which ought to be allowed for as it means having stand-by plant available.
The second issue is that of capital efficiency, hydrogen plant is very expensive, and even if the power were free, would be very expensive at the load -factor of wind generators. The variability of the power source would add further to the production costs.
Hydrogen may have some part to play in future energy mixes, but unless there is some big technical breakthrough, it is likely to be a niche market.
It is not actually enshrined in UK law as it is enshrined in EU law and when we leave the EU we can make our laws and remove our ties to EU laws and repealing this legislation is a realistic possibility.
Everyone seems to forget the other product from hydrogen generation: Oxygen. If wood chips are burnt in pure oxygen the temperature produced is very high, making for efficient turbines. The exhaust is 100% CO2 gas and water. The former could be pumped directly into spent oil wells in the north sea thus removing CO2 from the atmosphere and generating carbon credits while simultaneously producing more electricity.
Rather than providing a highly volatile alternative to lpg, an alternative view is to try and make a reversible electrolyser, as a relatively self contained energy storage system. The overall efficiency, costs and risks associated with supercooled high pressure hydrogen on a mobile application are somewhat daunting, compared to even the worst case safety scenario of battery vehicles. The thought that there will be a sufficient excess of renewable electricity that efficiecny of the process is not a concern seems very naive.
Wind and other renewable power at present is more expensive yes (Jack Broughton) but in several decades time will it still, or is there a viable renewable alternative? Several comments refer to sequestrating CO2, great if they were actually viable, but that and other by-products are inevitable if we don’t use water as the feedstock for hydrogen production. The release of oxygen as the production by-product is another advantage, especially if fed back into the water. Bearing in mind that an excess of oxygen is toxic! If we could have batteries that could charge in minutes, rather than hours, last decades instead years, had an energy density/tonne at least an order of magnitude better than at present, didn’t themselves produce end of life waste products then we could rely on batteries. The point of using renewable energy to produce hydrogen is that the initial source of that energy (wind, wave, tide, etc) is essentially free and does not cost to get out of the ground, reprocess and so on. If hydrogen is essentially free and without in human terms limit then overall system efficiency is not a significant issue. It isn’tas if fossil fuels are not without their own system efficiency issues. At some stage, sooner rather than later it is imperative that we provide an effective and practical alternative to oil, without going back into the transport stone age, dependant on horse and feet. And consider why we started to use oil fuels in the first place! Hydrogen can be burnt directly, in homes, IC engines, etc or can power fuel cells, and much more flexibly than batteries even with the inherent handling disadvantages .
Slight amendment to my comment above, should read ‘If that energy’ is essentially free and not the hydrogen!
Overall of course there will not be an excess of oxygen, but at the point of hydrogen extraction there will be, until it is burnt or consumed.
I see only one mention in the comments of the bi-product in the electrolysis process (O2) and none in the text. Surely this would be a valuable product to recover for industrial / medical purposes and would also be a ‘green’ oxygen product.
I find these Forum-type debates a bit annoying, because engineers like everyone else end up making partial arguments based on their pre-judged position. The only way to come to a sensible conclusion is through techno-economic analyses which take account of all variables within overall systems which provide for the desired functions (heat, mobility etc) and both current and projected future values of those variables.
Phil – agreed – but there are so many options, variables and usage timescales that it is virtually impossible to choose the correct initiatives to pursue. That is why I believe it is much more efficient to adopt solutions which work best for particular localities and abandon the ‘one size fits all’ approach.
Havr a look at http://www.netzerochem.com for a truly different way to make hydrogen, and very valuable co-products. Anywhere in the world, since it is not infrastructure dependent.