UK’s largest hydrogen project underway

BP is developing plans for the UK’s largest blue hydrogen production facility in Teesside, targeting one gigawatt of hydrogen production by 2030.

H2Teesside project plans to capture and send for storage up to two million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂) per year. This would make a major contribution to the UK Government’s target of developing five gigawatts of hydrogen production by 2030.

Blue hydrogen is produced by converting natural gas into hydrogen and CO₂, which is then captured and permanently stored. H2Teesside would be integrated with the region’s already-planned Net Zero Teesside (NZT) and Northern Endurance Partnership (NEP) carbon capture use and storage projects, both led by BP as the operator.

BP has also signed agreements to work with Venator, one of the largest global producers of titanium dioxide pigments, to scope the supply of clean hydrogen; Northern Gas Networks, the gas distributor for the North of England, to work together to initiate decarbonisation of the gas networks in the UK; and Tees Valley Combined Authority to explore the potential for green hydrogen in the region, including the development of Teesside as the UK’s first hydrogen transport hub.

Teesside area in north-east England is in close proximity to North Sea storage sites, pipe corridors and existing operational hydrogen storage and distribution capabilities. Industries in Teesside account for over 5 per cent of the UK’s industrial emissions and the region is home to five of the country’s top 25 emitters.

The project could support the conversion of surrounding industries to use hydrogen in place of natural gas, playing an important role in decarbonizing a cluster of industries in Teesside.

A final investment decision (FID) is expected in early 2024, and the project could begin production in 2027 or earlier.

Dev Sanyal, BP’s executive vice president of gas and low carbon energy said: “Clean hydrogen is an essential complement to electrification on the path to net zero. Blue hydrogen, integrated with carbon capture and storage, can provide the scale and reliability needed by industrial processes. It can also play an essential role in decarbonising hard-to-electrify industries and driving down the cost of the energy transition. H2Teesside, together with NZT and NEP, has the potential to transform the area into one of the first carbon neutral clusters in the UK, supporting thousands of jobs and enabling the UK’s Ten Point Plan.”

Anne-Marie Trevelyan, UK energy minister, added: “Driving the growth of low carbon hydrogen is a key part of the Prime Minister’s Ten Point Plan and our Energy White Paper and can play an important part in helping us end our contribution to climate change by 2050. Clean hydrogen has huge potential to help us fully decarbonise across the UK and it is great to see bp exploring its full potential on Teesside.”

BP begun a feasibility study into the project to explore technologies that could capture up to 98 per cent of carbon emissions from the hydrogen production process.

Last year, BP and Ørsted signed a Letter of Intent (LOI) to work together to develop a ‎project in Germany for industrial-scale production of green hydrogen.