This large, complex proposal is one of two major blue hydrogen projects under development in the UK as part of industrial clusters combining H2 and CCS — the other is BP and Equinor’s East Coast Cluster in northeast England — with the aim of helping the country reach its target of 10GW of clean hydrogen production capability by 2030.

The hydrogen element is being led by Progressive Energy in a 50:50 joint venture with Indian Oil refiner Essar Oil. The two companies, as Vertex Hydrogen, plan to build a 3.8GW hydrogen production facility at the Stanlow Manufacturing Complex in Ellesmere Port, near Liverpool, which also houses Essar’s giant Stanlow refinery.

Italian oil giant Eni, owner of depleted gas fields in the Liverpool Bay, is leading the CCS element of the project, building a CO2 pipeline and preparing two gas fields, Hamilton and Lennox, to store carbon dioxide from the HyNet hydrogen plant and other industrial emitters in the area. The company claims it can store 97% of emissions from the HyNet cluster. Operational start-up is planned for 2025.

The Stanlow hydrogen facility is slightly further down the development pipeline. Progressive and Essar envisage 350MW of hydrogen production by 2026, with 700MW coming on line in 2027. A further scale up to 3.8GW could happen in two additional phases by 2030.

The integrated plant encompasses a gas-heated reformer (GHR) and autothermal reformer (ATR) that will produce a syngas of hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The gas then passes through a carbon removal process at pressure, producing a stream of hydrogen and another of carbon dioxide that can be transported off-site via Eni’s pipeline.

According to Vertex, the ATR can produce hydrogen at 93% efficiency (as opposed to steam methane reforming efficiency of around 80%) by introducing oxygen into the reformer instead of burning methane in air.

Project partner Cadent is working on a brand new 125km hydrogen pipeline to deliver hydrogen to both long-term storage and HyNet’s customers, which in the first phase of the project would be large-scale industrial users.

In principle, the project appears to have no shortage of interested parties.

So far, Vertex Hydrogen has secured “heads of terms” — essentially, a memorandum of understanding — with Essar to supply 280MW of H2 to the Stanlow Refinery to decarbonise its existing hydrogen production and to use in its new hydrogen furnace, delivered in August, to provide heat for the refining process. This accounts for almost all the output of the first phase of the scheme.

Two big fossil-gas users in the area, Unilever and Pilkington Glass, took part in a hydrogen fuel-switching trial facilitated by Progressive Energy last year. And HyNet has also secured memoranda of understanding from 28 different industrial energy users in the area to offtake hydrogen in the future — mostly to replace fossil gas in on-site power production, or for industrial heat in glassmaking.

In total, these add up to around 4GW, Parkin tells Hydrogen Insight, all of HyNet’s capacity to 2030.

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