UK MANUFACTURING WILL RISE TO THE GREEN CHALLENGE, SAYS MAKE UK BOSS

practices. It has also been challenged to meet the government’s much touted green industrial revolution to accelerate the UK’s route to net zero carbon emissions.

After all it’s been through over the past four years, and the major challenges that two of the UK’s most successful manufacturing sectors (aerospace and automotive manufacturing) are currently facing following the slump in air travel and new car sales, is it ready?

Stephen Phipson, CBE is the Chief Executive of Make UK, the UK’s biggest manufacturing support organisation. While he is very concerned about some areas of UK manufacturing and their supply chains, he says there are wider reasons for optimism.

“The government is about to start refreshing the industrial strategy, which will be green focused, and there will be some major opportunities for manufacturers,” he said.

One nascent green technology which he is particularly excited about is carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS).

“This is an emissions reduction technology that can be applied across the energy system. CCUS captures carbon dioxide (CO2) from fuel combustion or industrial processes, and either reuses it as a resource to create new products or services, or stores it deep underground in geological formations, effectively sending it back where it came from.”

CCUS technologies also provide the foundation for carbon removal or "negative emissions" when the CO2 comes from bio-based processes, or directly from the atmosphere.

“The technology is there – we just need some pump priming from government to get it going,” said Stephen.

Another technology where the UK is seen as a world leader is in the development of hydrogen as a zerocarbon fuel.

While hydrogen has been used in industrial processes for many years, the aim now is to produce the fuel without releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This can be done through green hydrogen – produced using renewable energy and electrolysis to split water, and blue hydrogen, which captures those emissions and stores them underground to prevent them causing climate change.

In Boris Johnson’s 10-point plan for a green industrial revolution, published last November, the Prime Minister said the government would set aside up to £500 million to invest in trialling hydrogen for heating and cooking in homes.

This would start with a hydrogen neighbourhood in 2023, moving to a hydrogen village by 2025, with an aim for a hydrogen town before the end of the decade.

Hydrogen (like nuclear fusion) has been touted for many years as the fuel of the future, but the technology hasn’t been ready. However, that could be changing said Stephen: “The UK is highly innovative in this area and other countries want access to our worldleading expertise,” he said.

So much so that the UK could use its knowledge in the development of hydrogen as a negotiating tool in trade deals, he thinks.

It’s innovations such as these which will help the UK manufacturing sector grow again, Stephen added.

“The UK is very, very good at high tech, innovative small volume manufacturing. We are also very good at automation, digitisation and logistics.

“We have become incredibly successful at assembly – you only have to look at Jaguar Land Rover in Warwickshire and

Nissan Sunderland, which is often cited as the most efficient car plant in Europe, for that.”

But before our manufacturing sector can emerge into the sunlit uplands, it’s looking like the UK will see a 12 per cent drop in manufacturing output in 2020.

To put that in perspective: in 2008 during the banking crisis manufacturing output fell by 11.7 per cent, and it took until 2019 to return to pre-2008 levels.

“We lost a decade of manufacturing in that time,” said Stephen. “We’re not going to see a V shaped recovery for manufacturing, and that is our challenge.”