Ms Tara Connolly:

On the question of hydrogen, the main thing I would see coming from Brussels is a political threat or risk.

The debate around hydrogen was nowhere two years ago but everyone has been talking about it for the past two years and that did not come out of nowhere. We need to be careful.

The idea of a strategy is interesting in terms of settling some of these discussions. Some stakeholders would prefer a broad and vague discussion about hydrogen that leaves everything on the table. I agree with some of the statements that what we need first is an understanding of how much hydrogen we can produce from renewable electricity, because the fact that grid-based electricity in Ireland has so much gas means electrolytic hydrogen has quite a high carbon footprint. It would also help us understand where it will go and the infrastructure implications of that.

What could be a risk is the idea that every single piece of current gas infrastructure in Ireland can and should be converted to using hydrogen when we know there are certain sectors where that is probably not desirable even if it is feasible. For example, in the case of low temperature building heating, there are much better alternatives in terms of cutting demand use, converting to heat pumps and putting in district heating where that can help. District heating can also work off heat pumps. Those are the areas where there needs to be serious discussion about the future of those sort of pipelines. The study I mentioned previously identified that the future hydrogen network would likely be limited to ports and around industrial areas, because they will have the supply coming in, and linking up to where the demand is. Outside that, where there is no large hydrogen demand is where we need to start thinking about the future of those grids.

Regarding the question of blending, hydrogen is a far smaller molecule than gas, so if 5% hydrogen is blended, it only displaces about 1.6% fossil gas, which gives an idea of the savings that are made assuming the hydrogen is zero carbon hydrogen. In terms of efforts to decarbonise, blending is not particularly useful. It can gloss over the question of where we do and do not need our grids for hydrogen in the future and can undermine gas quality issues, which is a concern for those industrial end users. In Brussels, the chemical sector has been quite vocal about its concerns about receiving blended hydrogen such as what it does with blended hydrogen, how it de-blends it and whether it must then store the hydrogen it has extracted. It raises an awful lot of questions. It is not so simple. Regarding the question of us being obliged to accept blended hydrogen, from speaking with the UK energy attaché in Brussels, my understanding is that the UK has been testing blending for quite some time at a very low rate - something like 1% or 2% - but that is definitely a two-way conversation. Regarding the proposal from the Commission, which is talking about a 5% cap, it is something that can be discussed between TSOs and governments, so perhaps this is also something that can be considered rather than just accepting whatever is being sent down the pipeline.