Contribution
My Lords, the reason why I am degrouping this amendment, and indeed Amendment 55, is because there have been developments that affect both these amendments.
Amendment 54 asks the Government to publish an assessment of the expected impact of the Bill on the number of jobs in Aberdeen. Since tabling the amendment, we have had a very remarkable interview with the new chairman of Great British Energy, who goes by the name of Jürgen Maier. For some reason, he did not seem even to know that the Government were committed to lowering people’s energy bills by £300. When he was asked about this, he just sort of waved the whole thing away. He also was asked about the number of jobs that were going to be brought to Aberdeen, and he said 300, which I think is a sort of top whack for the number of people he is going to employ in Great British Energy in Aberdeen. I think there was some hope that there would be rather more jobs than that in Aberdeen, but he did not seem to think that that was very important at all and, indeed, was something that stretched out to the next 10 or 20 years. He did not seem to want to be committed to any of this at all.
I think the Government have a slight problem if that is going to be the spokesman for renewable energy via Great British Energy, and I am not absolutely certain that they have the right man for the job. It seems to me important that you have somebody who stands up for the whole business of renewable energy and the ambitions—indeed, some of the things we voted on this evening—and objectives of Great British Energy. I think he should have a rather clearer idea of what he is trying to do because, if he does not, he will do nothing but bring embarrassment to the Government and everybody who believes in renewable energy.
The other thing, of course, that we must look for when it comes to jobs in Aberdeen is the renewal of the licences for the Jackdaw and Rosebank fields. I gather the Government are looking at this quite closely. It does seem to me to be absolute madness—which can only really be entertained by the Energy Secretary, Mr Ed Miliband—that, at the end of the day, we envisage a future where, inevitably, we are going to need oil and, for some extraordinary reason, that oil cannot come from our oil fields; the oil and gas will have to be imported from other countries, with, of course, a greater carbon footprint than there would otherwise be. That does not seem to be anything other than complete insanity.
I think the world is coming to realise that, although there have been these very ambitious goals of reaching net zero, the fact is that we are going to need fossil fuels for much longer than most people think. If that is the case, we might as well use our own sources of oil and gas and employ our own people, rather than employ Americans and people in the Gulf and import it from there. As I say, there will be a larger footprint if the whole thing is imported into this country from abroad.
So it strikes me that we have our priorities very seriously mixed up on this, and the Government will have to change their attitude on all of this, because otherwise we are going to make ourselves look absolutely ridiculous and do nothing to lower global emissions, which is the objective we are all trying to get.
My Amendment 55 deals with the viability of the Government reaching their net zero target. This, for me, has been very much affected by the breakfast I had this morning with people at JCB, who are very keen that we move to a much greater production of liquid hydrogen, because they believe that that is the one fuel that can actually drive heavy vehicles such as theirs, and that that fuel has a great future there. The good news about liquid hydrogen is that they think it could be very effectively used not only in heavy vehicles such as lorries and so forth but also in trains. They were not so happy that this was an answer for aviation—but aviation is a big and growing business, as the Government recognise, with their dedication to building a fourth runway at Heathrow. Obviously, aviation is going to be a growth business as more people fly around the world, and if we are not going to have a constant source of CO2 emissions from that, we have to move to a better fuel.
So there are many reasons why hydrogen ticks many boxes, but the problem about it is that it is not actually a silver bullet but a golden bullet. It is extremely expensive to produce and uses very large amounts of electricity. So I hope that what we will be looking at is using small modular reactors dedicated to actually producing hydrogen. Perhaps—and I am not saying this will happen—this will be able to bring the price down to a level that is bearable and something we can live with, because, if we could get the price of liquid hydrogen down, it would make a massive difference to the ability to run heavy vehicles and aircraft and other forms of transport without polluting the atmosphere and increasing the CO2 footprint, which is one of the problems that we have today. I look forward to what the Minister has to say about both my amendments and I beg to move.