BP has announced it is developing plans for the UK’s largest blue hydrogen production facility, targeting 1GW of hydrogen production by 2030.
The project, called H2Teesside, would also capture and send for storage up to two million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.
The company said the plant would support development of the Teesside region as the UK’s first hydrogen transport hub – a project unveiled by the Department for Transport in September 2020 – and make a major contribution to the government’s target of developing 5GW of hydrogen production by 2030.
Dev Sanyal, BP’s executive vice president of gas and low carbon energy, said: “Clean hydrogen is an essential complement to electrification on the path to net zero. Blue hydrogen, integrated with carbon capture and storage, can provide the scale and reliability needed by industrial processes. It can also play an essential role in decarbonising hard-to-electrify industries and driving down the cost of the energy transition.”
UK energy minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan said: “Driving the growth of low carbon hydrogen is a key part of the prime minister’s 10-point plan and our energy white paper and can play an important part in helping us end our contribution to climate change by 2050
“Clean hydrogen has huge potential to help us fully decarbonise across the UK and it is great to see BP exploring its full potential on Teesside.”
The final investment decision (FID) for the project would be in early 2024, and it could begin production in 2027 or earlier.
Blue hydrogen is produced by converting natural gas into hydrogen and CO₂, which is then captured and permanently stored. H2Teesside would be integrated with the region’s already-planned Net Zero Teesside (NZT) and Northern Endurance Partnership (NEP) carbon capture use and storage (CCUS) projects, both of which are led by BP as operator.
The project would be developed in stages, with an initial 500MW of blue hydrogen capacity in production by 2027 or earlier, and additional capacity to be deployed by 2030 as decarbonisation of the industrial cluster and hydrogen demand gathers pace. BP sees potential for further hydrogen demand in Teesside beyond 2030.
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