Norwegian state-owned energy company Equinor and UK utility SSE Thermal are to jointly develop both a 100pc hydrogen power plant and a gas-fired power plant equipped with carbon capture and storage (CCS) in the UK’s Humber region.

The Keadby Hydrogen power station—which has a peak hydrogen demand of 1,800MW—would be fed by blue hydrogen that is created from natural gas at the site, but could accept any form of hydrogen in the future. The 900MW Keadby 3 power station would be a more conventional combined-cycle gas turbine design but equipped with CCS technology.

“The Humber has to be at the centre of the UK’s decarbonisation strategy” Wheeler, SSE Thermal

The two plants would share infrastructure to transport CO₂ to the proposed Endurance storage site in the North Sea, for which the Northern Endurance Partnership (NEP) consortium was formed to develop last October.

If the two power plant projects go ahead they would replace older and more carbon-intensive generation on the grid, according to Stephen Wheeler, managing director of SSE Thermal. “As the largest and most carbon-intensive industrial cluster, the Humber has to be at the centre of the UK’s decarbonisation strategy,” he says.

The Humber region emits 12mn t/yr of CO₂ which is more than 3pc of the UK’s 354mn t total in 2019.

Both plants are in the development phase, and FID will depend on the policy frameworks set by the government in the coming months. The UK is expected to announce its national hydrogen strategy later this year.

If it goes ahead, Keadby 3 alone could meet nearly 15pc of the government’s target to remove and store 10mn t/yr of CO₂ by 2030. And Keadby Hydrogen would consume a third of the UK national target for 5GW of low-carbon hydrogen production by the same date.

Multiple projects

CCS and hydrogen are likely to be key to the UK meeting its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, according to Grete Tveit, senior vice president for low-carbon solutions at Equinor. “We believe that hydrogen and CCS will be vital technologies for reaching net-zero emissions in sectors that are hard to abate,” she says.

Equinor is already developing a 600MW project in the Humber region called H2H Saltend that would reform natural gas into hydrogen and share the same infrastructure as the Keadby plants for transportation and storage.

Equinor is one of the six companies that form the NEP, which has the goal of developing the offshore CO₂ infrastructure in the North Sea.

The NEP—also comprising operator BP, Italy’s Eni, the UK’s National Grid, Shell and Total—won funding from the UK government’s £171mn ($235mn) Industrial Decarbonisation Challenge last month.

The Norwegian firm is also involved in various other projects that have already received some initial funding from government.

12mn t/yr — Amount of CO2 emitted by Humber region

The proposal from Equinor and SSE lays out an attractive package for Zero Carbon Humber to be in Track 1 of the government's CCS scheme, Stuart Hazeldine, professor of CCS at the University of Edinburgh, tells Transition Economist. “But it is still dependent on the Endurance storage site being developed,” he says.

Also dependent on that storage site being developed would be the CCUS proposition being progressed at Net Zero Teesside. Scotland’s Acorn Project—also in the running to be on the first track of the government’s CCS scheme—is likely to be cheaper and quicker to develop and has access to multiple secure storage sites.

Multiple projects will be needed eventually, Hazeldine adds. “All the projects are needed to achieve the UK's decarbonisation objectives, so the question for the government is how to move ahead with the first ones while keeping the others in play,” he says.

Equinor and SSE have worked together on several projects, including the development of an offshore wind farm at Dogger Bank.

Equinor is also participating in Norway’s Northern Lights project, which has received Norway’s first licence to capture and store CO₂ on the Norwegian continental shelf.

---

Author: Tom Young