Jamie Stone

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I congratulate the hon. Member for Worcester (Tom Collins) on a very timely debate indeed; he knows his subject, and that is to the benefit of us all. Touching on the contribution made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse), if we had mentioned hydrogen aviation prior to about 1940 it would have had people screaming in fear, because that was the era of the Hindenburg and the R101. The hon. Member for Worcester is absolutely correct that the potential for air transport is massive; the fact that when hydrogen and oxygen are combined we get water means that it is the cleanest of all forms of energy. I made mention in my intervention of the production of ammonia. If my chemistry lessons have stuck, I think it is NH₄, which can then be turned into fertiliser. Our farmers are very worried by the increase in fertiliser prices, and it looks as if they are going up again this year. That can play merry hell with their farm accounts as they try to forward guess what their profitability will be. We know that EU tariffs on Russian fertiliser mean an increased price for EU countries. My point is a simple one: the more we can promote the manufacture of fertiliser out of ammonia from hydrogen produced in the UK, then the better that will be for this country. We have a great export opportunity. I give great credit to the previous and present Governments—my constituents are very grateful to them—for having had the courage to go for Cromarty Firth and Inverness green freeport. The idea producing hydrogen was part and parcel of formulating that bid to the previous Government, and of the way we talk to the present Government. The experts in the field have been telling me that the potential for bulk hydrogen to be sailed across the North sea from the north of Scotland to very keen markets in Europe is huge, and that there is real money to be made here. When the bids were put together, the production of green hydrogen was part of that bid. The Minister, whom I, like the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) am very glad to see in his place, knows full well that the issue of the grid we are proposing—where the pylons and lines go, whether they are sub-sea or above the ground, the batteries and all that—is a controversial and hot topic. However, I give him his due; in his previous incarnation he was as helpful as he could possibly be. When the grid improvements were initially proposed, and yes we of course have to do that if we are serious about getting to net zero, I wrote to the then Prime Minister and the First Minister of Scotland to ask whether the proposals matched the production of green hydrogen that we are keen to do in the north of Scotland. I may or may not have got the formula for ammonia right but, if I remember my physics correctly, the longer the distance one has to send electricity down a wire or a cable, the more energy is lost. Is it I²R? It is something like that; I have probably got it wrong, and the Minister probably knows it better than I do, but the point is that the longer the cable, the more resistance, and energy is lost because heat is produced and radiates off it. I earnestly say to the present Government, looking at the production of green hydrogen in the north of Scotland, “Would it not make sense to produce an awful lot of that as near as possible to where the energy is actually being created?” We have a plethora of wind farms in the north of Scotland. We have the Beatrice wind farm off the coast of my constituency and there are many others up and running or projected for Scotland. It seems to me that the manufacture of hydrogen as near as possible to that source of energy would make enormous sense.