Chamber and committees

I am grateful for the opportunity to intervene. I note and welcome the fact that Sarah Boyack is specifically referencing green hydrogen. I was a little confused by the fact that the Labour amendment talks about “low-carbon opportunities”. Will Sarah Boyack clarify whether she agrees that neither Government should be giving any support to hydrogen production from fossil fuels?

The cabinet secretary began by talking about hydrogen’s role in helping to decarbonise “hard-to-abate” sectors of the economy. Why is she now talking in positive terms about using it to decarbonise an easy-to-abate sector such as home heating?

Without rehashing the disagreement that we have had, I ask whether, if the UK Climate Change Committee presents the Scottish Government with the same advice that it has given to the UK Government, which is that hydrogen does not have a role for home heating and has a limited or niche role for transport, the Scottish Government will accept it.

I will address that in my closing comments.

In presenting its advice on the seventh carbon budget to the UK Government, the UK Climate Change Committee wrote that hydrogen has

“an important role within the electricity supply sector as a ... long-term storable energy that can be dispatched when needed and as a feedstock for synthetic fuels. However, we see no role for hydrogen in buildings heating and only a very niche, if any, role in surface transport.”

I urge the Scottish Government to listen to the UK CCC, which is its own adviser and source of expert advice on climate action, to understand and accept its position, and ensure that our approach to the development of hydrogen focuses on the most efficient use of what could be an important part of our energy system and economy.

I move amendment S6M-17399.2, to leave out from “be a leading” to end and insert:

“play a leading role in developing a green hydrogen industry, both to help decarbonise challenging sectors of the economy, and for export; recognises that hydrogen produced from fossil fuels not only produces greenhouse gas emissions but also risks undermining confidence in the future of the green hydrogen sector; further recognises that the use of green hydrogen needs to be prioritised in areas that are hard to decarbonise in other ways, and that its use for domestic heating can never achieve the efficiency of other clean heat sources, and therefore regrets that the First Minister described hydrogen for domestic heating as ‘the path that we must take’, in February 2025; recognises that the UK Climate Change Committee sees ‘no role for hydrogen in buildings heating and only a very niche, if any, role in surface transport’, and urges the Scottish Government to accept that the value of green hydrogen will be in areas such as hard-to-decarbonise industrial sectors and energy storage.”

Do I have some time in hand?

Absolutely. The size of the molecule, compared to the atom, also factors into the infrastructure, because leakage would be significant if we do not replace some of the infrastructure.

As recently as February, the First Minister made a speech describing hydrogen heating as a

“shining example of how Scotland is leading the way in finding solutions to tackle climate change.”

He said that it was

“ a clear signal of the path that we must take.”

That is absurd. Most of those in the gas industry who have been pushing that nonsense have started to give up on it. The idea is that it is a trial or a proof of concept, but the question is not whether using hydrogen for heating would work. Of course it would work, just as flushing your toilet with sparkling mineral water would work, but it would never be a sensible thing to do.

If I understand the argument correctly, that still depends on the development and efficiency of carbon capture and storage, which has yet to be proven and will always add additional cost.

Green hydrogen is where Scotland has a massive advantage. The potential scale of renewables generation in Scotland is immense, and if we develop that potential fully, we will be producing far more electricity than we need or can export through transmission infrastructure, which means that the production of hydrogen is an obvious opportunity.

Where hydrogen comes from is not the end of the story. We also need to address how it is used. There are still those who cling to the idea that we can simply inject hydrogen into existing energy systems, whether that is the gas grid for heating or transport systems to displace fossil fuels, but there are some fundamental limits that we need to address.

We can generate renewable electricity and use it to produce hydrogen. The hydrogen can then be stored, transported to where it is needed and turned back into useful energy, but at every step in that journey, efficiency is lost, so we end up with less useful energy at the end of the process than was generated at the start. Any use case in which direct electrification can be achieved will always be the better choice when compared with hydrogen, not only with today’s technology, but under the laws of physics.

That argument is only stronger for heat, because the technology that some countries have been deploying at scale for decades, and with which Scotland is struggling to catch up, goes far beyond even the theoretical limit of the 100 per cent efficiency that a closed system can reach. Heat pumps do not turn electricity into heat, but rather use electricity to gather heat from the ambient environment. They can produce up to three or four times as much heat output from the electrical input that they run on. Hydrogen can never do that, yet the Scottish Government continues to promote the notion of hydrogen for domestic heating.

The member talked about energy security. In what way does it assist energy security to power home heating with something so massively inefficient as hydrogen, compared with the extremely high level of efficiency that comes from direct electrification? That will undermine the country’s energy security rather than help it.

The Government has been blowing hot and cold on this issue. Today, we have heard very little recognition of the human impact that cuts to IJB funding are having, and Neil Gray has brushed off any suggestion that the Government has a responsibility in that regard.

However, just last month, during First Minister’s question time, the First Minister said:

“There will need to be a wider conversation between the Government and the integration joint board to address the concerns that have been properly put to me by members today.”—[Official Report, 27 March 2025; c 18-19.]

His tone was very open. Does the Government recognise that there would be a broad cross-party welcome if the Government were to accept responsibility for taking forward the wider conversation that the First Minister promised? Will that happen?

I was about to ask whether the cabinet secretary acknowledges the extraordinary degree of fear and anxiety that is being caused to the trans community around the country as a result of the update late on Friday night from the EHRC.

I have heard from people who were not even sure whether they should go to work the next morning, because they did not know whether they would be able to do something as simple as go to the toilet. Does the cabinet secretary agree that the UK is now at risk of breaching trans people’s human rights—just as it did decades ago, before the Gender Recognition Act 2004 was in place—as well as breaching the freedom of the wider LGBT community to organise in the inclusive manner that the vast majority of our members wish to? When the Government meets the EHRC, will the cabinet secretary make it crystal clear that it is unacceptable to see decades of progress on equality and human rights rolled back in that way?