> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.kentcurrent.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Can the Lower Thames Crossing really be Britain’s greenest road? - URL: https://www.kentcurrent.news/can-the-lower-thames-crossing-really-be-britains-greenest-road/ - Published: 2026-10-01T18:21:04.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-01T18:21:04.000Z - Description: Plus the beavers that waited 23 years for freedom - Author: Ed Jennings - Tags: News **The Lower Thames Crossing is finally moving towards construction, complete with a promise to become Britain’s greenest road, so we’ve looked at what that actually means for an £11bn motorway. Plus Kent’s original reintroduced beavers are finally allowed out after 23 years, by which point plenty of other beavers have already beaten them to it.* ### Can the Lower Thames Crossing really be Britain’s greenest road? There are several obvious ways to sell an £11bn road. It will make journeys faster. It will take pressure off the Dartford Crossing. It will stop much of north Kent from grinding to a halt whenever somebody breaks down in the wrong place. 'Britain’s greenest road' is a slightly less obvious pitch. But that is increasingly how National Highways talks about the Lower Thames Crossing, the long-delayed new road between Kent and Essex which is finally moving from years of consultations, planning battles and increasingly alarming price tags into actual construction. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4a/81/4a81a2ea-fb28-4a6c-89c9-b54d120a45ef/content/images/2026/10/LTC.jpg) We previously looked at [who stands to win and lose from the Lower Thames Crossing](https://www.kentcurrent.news/lower-thames-crossing-the-winners/), including the considerable benefits that extra cross-Thames capacity could bring to Kent alongside the environmental and local disruption caused by actually building it. This week, [National Highways announced](https://nationalhighways.co.uk/roads-and-travel/road-projects/lower-thames-crossing/news-and-media/lower-thames-crossing-begins-one-of-world-s-largest-deployments-of-zero-emissions-construction-machinery/?ref=kentcurrent.news) that more than 30 electric, hydrogen and alternative-fuel machines are already working on the project. By the peak of construction in 2028, that number is expected to rise to around 150. National Highways says it will become one of the world’s largest deployments of low-emission construction machinery and help make the crossing Britain’s first major infrastructure project to be carbon neutral during construction. Which leaves the fairly obvious question of what a carbon-neutral motorway actually is. More than a few carefully selected electric diggers and a press release back the claim. Conventional diesel has been banned from Lower Thames Crossing worksites. The project has bought 2,500 tonnes of green hydrogen, which National Highways says will replace more than 12 million litres of diesel. The enormous tunnel boring machine due to dig beneath the Thames will run on renewable electricity. Designs have been changed so that one machine can bore both tunnels rather than using two, while contractors are being pushed towards lower-carbon concrete, recycled steel and other less carbon-intensive materials. More unusually, the project also has a legally binding limit on how much carbon it can emit while it is being built. Its original construction forecast was around 1.76 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. Contractors have committed to keeping that below 1.44 million tonnes, while National Highways has set itself a more ambitious target of around 840,000 tonnes. National Highways says it aims to [cut the construction footprint by 70%](https://nationalhighways.co.uk/roads-and-travel/road-projects/lower-thames-crossing/nature/cutting-carbon/?ref=kentcurrent.news), before offsetting what cannot be eliminated. That is a substantial reduction. It does not, however, mean the crossing somehow appears out of the ground without producing any carbon. Even if the lower target is met, construction will still produce hundreds of thousands of tonnes of emissions. National Highways’ 'carbon neutral' claim relies on balancing the remainder afterwards through carbon removals or offsets. Another slightly awkward detail appears in this week’s announcement. National Highways groups electric, hydrogen and HVO-powered machinery together under the banner of zero-emission construction equipment. HVO, or hydrotreated vegetable oil, can produce very large carbon savings over its full lifecycle compared with conventional diesel, particularly when made from waste oils. It is becoming increasingly common on construction sites where fully replacing heavy diesel machinery remains difficult. But a machine burning HVO still has an exhaust pipe and still emits carbon dioxide while it is running. It is cleaner than diesel, but not literally zero-emission. That is not enough to dismiss what National Highways is doing here. The more interesting problem starts when the builders eventually go home. The project’s carbon-neutral promise mainly concerns the road building process. Emissions from the traffic which will use it are treated separately, because National Highways can decide what powers a tunnel boring machine but has considerably less control over whether somebody drives through the finished tunnel in an electric car or a diesel lorry. Historically, road user emissions have been much higher. The project’s original environmental assessment estimated around 1.76 million tonnes of emissions from construction, compared with roughly 4.8 million tonnes of additional emissions from road users over 60 years. Add maintenance and other operational emissions and the original modelling produced around 6.6 million tonnes of additional carbon overall. National Highways argues that figure reflects an outdated view of what Britain’s vehicle fleet will look like over the coming decades. Its case is that [road transport will be substantially cleaner by the time the crossing opens](https://nationalhighways.co.uk/roads-and-travel/road-projects/lower-thames-crossing/nature/cutting-carbon/?ref=kentcurrent.news), as electric and hybrid vehicles increasingly replace petrol and diesel ones. If government plans to decarbonise cars and lorries actually work, National Highways’ later modelling suggests road user emissions could fall by 76% to 88%. That would make a very large difference, but it also exposes the central tension in describing the Lower Thames Crossing as green. National Highways can control the steel, concrete, fuel and machinery used to build it. It can write carbon limits into contracts and force suppliers to develop different ways of working. What it cannot control is whether Britain succeeds in cleaning up the vehicles which will eventually use the road, and there will be a lot of them. The [Dartford Crossing currently carries around 150,000 vehicles on an average day](https://nationalhighways.co.uk/roads-and-travel/road-projects/lower-thames-crossing/the-need-for-the-lower-thames-crossing/the-dartford-crossing/?ref=kentcurrent.news), despite having been designed for around 135,000\. On the busiest days, that rises to 180,000. It is also incredibly fragile. National Highways records around 3,000 incidents there each year, and the quirks of moving dangerous goods and abnormal loads through the tunnels mean one closes, on average, every 15 minutes during peak periods. The Lower Thames Crossing is intended to almost double road capacity across the Thames east of London. Kent has spent years living with the consequences of depending on a single overloaded crossing for a huge proportion of its road traffic. As we wrote when the project was finally approved, there is a compelling pro-development case for getting on and building the infrastructure the country needs, rather than acknowledging problems indefinitely while finding increasingly elaborate reasons not to fix them. The more interesting question is whether one of Britain’s biggest road schemes can also force the construction industry to get better at building enormous things. Carbon reduction was built into the procurement process rather than tacked on afterwards. Contractors have accepted tighter limits than National Highways originally proposed, while the scale of the project gives manufacturers and suppliers an unusually large market for technologies which might otherwise struggle to move beyond small trials. If the Lower Thames Crossing helps turn electric heavy machinery, hydrogen power and lower-carbon construction materials from expensive novelties into ordinary kit, that benefits the country well beyond Kent. None of that makes an £11bn road environmentally harmless, because an £11bn road was never going to be. But that is not a particularly useful standard for deciding whether to build infrastructure. Kent needs more capacity across the Thames, the existing crossing is plainly inadequate, and after years of talking about the problem, actually building something to solve it is broadly a good thing. The more worthwhile test is whether we can build the infrastructure we need while doing less damage in the process. If the Lower Thames Crossing proves that huge projects can be delivered with substantially less carbon than the ones that came before them, that would be a meaningful achievement. Britain needs to get better at building things. It might as well get better at building them cleanly too. ## ****Enjoying this? There’s more where it came from.** Join readers across Kent receiving our independent reporting on the stories shaping the county, straight to their inbox. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### Kent’s original beavers are finally being allowed out After more than two decades behind an enclosure at Ham Fen near Sandwich, Kent Wildlife Trust has removed the barrier around Britain’s first beaver reintroduction project, allowing the animals to wander into the wider east Kent landscape. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4a/81/4a81a2ea-fb28-4a6c-89c9-b54d120a45ef/content/images/2026/10/AdobeStock_526712494.jpeg) More of these weird little guys are now roaming free in Kent. This would sound like quite a major moment in the return of beavers to Kent if the county was not already full of them. While the Ham Fen animals have spent the last 23 years living inside a managed reserve, a sizeable wild population has established itself across the River Stour. A [Natural England survey published in 2024](https://publications.naturalengland.org.uk/publication/6358002924519424?ref=kentcurrent.news) found 51 active beaver territories across the Stour catchment, plus another 19 areas showing signs of activity. So [removing the Ham Fen barrier last week](https://kentwildlifetrust.org.uk/news/beavers-take-major-step-back-wild-ham-fen-kent-wildlife-trust-removes-enclosure-barrier?ref=kentcurrent.news) is not really the moment Kent gets wild beavers. It is the moment the animals from Britain’s pioneering official project are finally allowed to join all the unofficial ones already roaming around outside. The Ham Fen experiment began in 2000, when Kent Wildlife Trust and Wildwood Trust started looking at whether beavers could help manage one of Kent’s last surviving areas of fenland. Traditional machinery was difficult and expensive to use in the wet conditions, so the theory was simple enough: Get the beavers to do some of the work. Two families arrived in 2003, followed by another family from Germany in 2008 to improve genetic diversity. Since then, the animals have felled trees, built dams, raised water levels and created a mixture of open water, wetland, scrub and woodland. Or, to put it another way, they have acted exactly like beavers. The new freedom follows a change in government policy last year, allowing licensed wild releases where management plans are in place. Allowing beavers to move freely comes with one fairly obvious complication. Beavers are very good at rearranging landscapes. This is useful if you are trying to create wetlands. It is less useful if the bit of landscape they decide to rearrange contains a drainage channel, flood defence or somebody’s field. That problem already exists in east Kent. The River Stour Internal Drainage Board, which manages water levels across almost 12,000 hectares of low-lying land, has previously had to repair beaver damage to flood embankments and train staff to legally alter or remove dams, burrows and lodges where they cause problems. Beavers are protected, so landowners cannot simply dismantle whatever they build because it is inconvenient. Natural England licences allow intervention where animals threaten property, infrastructure or public safety, but the general approach is now to manage around them rather than remove them. Kent Wildlife Trust says it is working with more than 250 farmers, landowners and organisations across the Stour catchment on how that coexistence works in practice. Which makes Ham Fen’s newly liberated residents slightly less pioneering than they once were. When the project began, beavers had been absent from Britain for centuries and deliberately releasing them into the wild was barely imaginable. Now east Kent has an established population spread across the Stour, with animals turning up around Ashford, Stodmarsh and even Canterbury. Britain’s first official beaver project has, after 23 years, finally caught up with what the beavers themselves were already doing. ### Footnotes Have a Kent story you think we might be interested in? Get in touch via **hello(at)kentcurrent(dot)news** \- We’re always happy to talk off the record in the first instance… Follow us elsewhere: [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/kentcurrentnews), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/kentcurrentnews/?ref=kentcurrent.news), [BlueSky](https://bsky.app/profile/kentcurrent.news?ref=kentcurrent.news), and now [WhatsApp](https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029Vb7vdYP0VycKDXxi4e3z?ref=kentcurrent.news) for new story alerts.