Norwegian energy company Equinor has submitted a £16mn ($19.7mn) co-funded bid to the UK government for finance to help develop its 1.2GW H2H Production 2 project.

Equinor has already formally submitted plans for its H2H Saltend blue hydrogen facility in the UK. H2H Saltend is supported by six prospective industrial operators that have signed agreements for the development and commercialisation of the project, including potential future hydrogen supply.

Now the firm is evaluating the potential plans for a second facility to be located on the south bank of the Humber. If built, it will be connected to the same hydrogen and CO₂ injection pipelines as H2H Saltend.

Equinor hopes the project will be operational by 2028 and produce blue hydrogen to be used across multiple sectors in the region.

Potential offtakers include the Keadby hydrogen power station—which Equinor is planning to build in a joint venture with utility SSE Thermal and which will be the world’s first generator running on 100pc hydrogen—as well as the gas-fired Keadby 2, chemicals producers at the nearby Saltend chemicals park, and gas distributors for blending into the domestic heating network.

“The project is oversubscribed with mature offtakers, which span a variety of end-use sectors for hydrogen, showcasing the ability to build a complementary customer portfolio,” a spokesperson for Equinor tells Hydrogen Economist.

Once site selection is confirmed, Equinor will move forward with the planning applications and associated public and stakeholder consultations.

Contributing to targets

H2H Saltend and H2H Production 2 combined could deliver 18pc of the government’s target to have 10GW of hydrogen production capacity by 2030. Equinor has also announced a provisional plan to produce green hydrogen at Saltend from a third project, although this is unlikely to happen this decade.

1.2GW – Potential size of project

“This co-funded bid helps to maintain and unlock private investment in low-carbon hydrogen projects in the Humber. It will underpin the creation of a world-first hydrogen economy in an end-to-end value chain,” says Dan Sadler, Equinor’s vice-president for UK low-carbon solutions.

The bid was submitted jointly with the University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre to the government’s Net Zero Hydrogen Fund. The fund is administered by government body UK Research and Innovation and offers co-funding for development expenditure to support the commercial deployment of new low-carbon hydrogen production projects during the 2020s.

If successful, Equinor hopes the bid will help the project achieve FID in 2025.

Growing network

H2H Production 2, H2H Saltend and the Keadby hydrogen power plant would all be part of an industrial cluster known as Zero Carbon Humber. In October, the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy announced that the East Coast Cluster, of which Zero Carbon Humber forms a part, was one of two successful bids in the first track of its £1bn  carbon capture and storage competition.

This network will allow CO₂ generated during hydrogen production at Equinor’s two plants to be transported to, and stored under, the North Sea.

As part of the same network of linked projects, Equinor is planning a hydrogen storage facility at Aldbrough and has plans to use hydrogen in heating trials in towns in northern Lincolnshire, in line with the government’s ambition to decarbonise domestic heating.

The Zero Carbon Humber project includes 14 organisations committed to making the Humber the world’s first net-zero region by 2040. Humberside is the UK’s highest-emitting industrial cluster, with 12.4mn t/yr of CO₂ emissions.

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Author: Tom Young