On Wednesday 30th October, the Midlands Power Group were delighted to host the annual Toby Norris Memorial Lecture at Austin Court.  This year's speaker was Dave Parkin, a Director at Progressive Energy and an inspirational figure in the development of the HyNet integrated energy network in the North West of England.As the UK focuses ever increasing amounts of effort in decarbonising the economy by 2050, the potential role of hydrogen as a fuel in achievement of the goal is gaining significant traction.


Dave Parkin delivered an insightful and thought provoking lecture on how this might be achieved on a regional or national scale.  Starting with a simple concept of 'hot baths' of energy, he clearly demonstrated that the challenge of taking carbon out of energy has barely started with only two out of 29.5 baths per person currently being sourced from renewables.  With an annual aggregate energy supply of 1450TWh and only 205TWh supplied from low carbon sources, the challenge is immense.


Dave then proceeded to explain how hydrogen can safely be utilised to make a significant contribution to the long term solution.  Although ideally the production of hydrogen would use 100% renewable energy, this is neither practical nor economic at the moment.  Therefore initially hydrogen will need to be produced using a combination of natural gas fuel and efficient carbon capture & storage techniques.


To demonstrate the feasibility of this concept the HyNet project has been established in the North West of England by a number of big name partners, and is currently at the pre-FEED stage.  Through the use of largely existing and redundant industrial, network and storage facilities, an integrated hydrogen production and carbon capture system is proposed for operation by 2025.  This is very much seen as a scalable solution which could then be rolled out more widely in the medium term.


This was a high quality, leading edge talk given by an excellent speaker and very much in line with the intent of the Toby Norris Memorial Lecture.  The audience of 59 attendees raised several interesting questions at the end of the presentation, all of which Dave responded to comprehensively.


The lecture closed with Steve Argent, past Chair of the MPG, giving a Vote of Thanks to Dave for an excellent presentation of this incredibly important initiative in our national drive to remove the burning of carbon based fuels from our economy.


On behalf of the attendees and members of the Midlands Power Group, we would like to formally record our thanks to Dave Parkin for a most interesting and thought provoking Toby Norris Memorial Lecture.


Dave's lecture slides are available at https://communities.theiet.org/communities/files/154/17815