Decarbonising UK’s industrial heartlands critical to net zero

It’s clear that hydrogen can play a significant role as we try and reduce our carbon emissions.

The government plans to invest more than £1 billion in unlocking the potential of hydrogen and support the establishment of carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) in four industrial clusters by 2030 signalling a huge shift in the future of gas. To support government ambitions, we’re looking at how we can create a hydrogen backbone that joins key industrial areas together to allow broader access across the country.

The UK’s industrial heartlands play an important role in decarbonisation and are central to realising the full potential of hydrogen in a clean energy future. With government plans developing and funding announcements being made, National Grid is looking at how it can repurpose 2000km of existing gas transmission pipelines – around 25 per cent of the network – and link up clusters at Teesside, Humberside, Grangemouth, Southampton, North West and South Wales to create a backbone which could help accelerate the rollout of hydrogen across the country.

Connecting up these points will involve significant assessment, modelling and engineering, exploring potential routes, examining the readiness of existing assets and identifying the best way to transport the hydrogen from one centre to another. Joining the clusters could help UK to start decarbonising any industry, commercial, and even residential area that sit between these locations. Rather than limiting hydrogen to the initial clusters outlined in government plans, a network will start to form and, as the hydrogen capacity in the UK grows, we can look at the possibility of using hydrogen to power other industries and towns that hang off the backbone route.

Decarbonising the industrial heartlands and creating this backbone could be transformational for green ambitions. National Grid anticipates the backbone could carry at least a quarter of the current gas demand in Great Britain today, and provide vital resilience and storage needed for the transition to hydrogen. From a UK perspective, it would build on government plans of producing five gigawatts of low carbon hydrogen by 2030 and support the wider ten-point plan strategy. And there are additional benefits that we can tap into outside of Great Britain too.

Connecting the backbone to interconnectors at Bacton could open the door for future importing and exporting of hydrogen with European neighbours. Interconnectors already provide reliable, secure and flexible supply with the Netherlands and Belgium – this project could add hydrogen to the mix by linking up a UK backbone with the backbone being developed in the EU, enhancing the ability for both sides to adjust supply in response to peaks in demand.

To make the UK hydrogen backbone a reality and reap the benefits we need to look at where there is available capacity in the network and where there’s scope for conversion. National Grid will commence this evaluation in Scotland as part of the Scottish Net Zero Infrastructure (SNZI) programme which received funding from the UKRI last week. Our contribution to the wider Acorn project will be to review if there’s potential to reuse pipelines in the region, to free up capacity for hydrogen or CO2 transfer. Ultimately, the devil will be in the detail, as we get to grips with where capacity can be freed up and also where we might need assets to complete the backbone.

Developments for hydrogen are gathering pace and as the clusters develop, National Grid is ready to join them up. As we look ahead to 2030, the timing for a hydrogen backbone, the modelling, the planning, it’s all critical. If we can get this right, the impact for net zero could be game changing.