Hydrogen for heat ‘far more challenging’ than industrial switching – BP

Senior vice-president at oil major anticipates relative complexity of managing stakeholders and retrofitting will make hydrogen for domestic heating difficult to deploy in the short term

The hydrogen sector’s “collective efforts should be initially focused” on replacing grey hydrogen consumed in industry with low-carbon alternatives, rather than starting with using hydrogen for domestic heating, according to BP’s senior vice-president for hydrogen and CCS, Felipe Arbelaez, during a speech at the World Hydrogen Summit in Rotterdam. Part of this is due to the relative simplicity of such projects compared with other use cases. “Just two to three willing companies can launch a project, make it investable, and then execute it,” he says. “Hydrogen will go from local to regional to global” Arbelaez, BP He compares this to the sheer complexity involved in “using hydrogen to