SGN has secured funding to deliver a nationally strategic hydrogen transmission and storage project.
In early April, it announced that it had received £29.9mn from Ofgem and gas distribution companies, allowing it to test the use of high-pressure pipelines for hydrogen transmission and storage as an option for net zero heating. The project, based at Grangemouth in Scotland, will be delivered in partnership with INEOS and seek to determine whether Britain’s transmission networks can be repurposed for hydrogen gas.
An aim of the National Hydrogen Programme will be to determine the role of the Local Transmission System, which is the critical infrastructure connecting towns and cities to the National Transmission System, in system transformation and facilitating industrial clusters. SGN’s aim is to prepare the gas network for greener alternatives, which could include hydrogen, as Scotland and the UK target net zero by 2045 and 2050 respectively.
A decommissioned pipeline in Grangemouth will be used to test and evidence whether it can adapt to carry pure hydrogen. It is also statistically representative of the GB LTS, therefore offering a blueprint for repurposing all the high-pressure pipelines in Britain’s network. SGN’s project team will now research, develop, test and evidence the computability with hydrogen of the Grangemouth pipeline in preparation for a first of its kind repurposing trial and demonstration in 2024.
SGN Director of Energy Futures, Gus Mcintosh, said: “Our Local Transmission System is part of the national critical infrastructure that reaches millions of homes and businesses across the UK. So, repurposing it for hydrogen could support a hydrogen system transformation that is least cost and least disruptive to customers. The LTS provides an essential storage buffer that ensures variations in demand across all sectors, throughout the day and throughout the year, can be supplied resiliently.”
