Equinor and SSE’s hydrogen production facility will supply hydrogen to the Keadby power station which will use it to generate electricity in a first-of-its-kind low-carbon power station by removing carbon emissions via an attached CCS facility
Keadby 1 Power Station in Lincolnshire, UK. Credit: Equinor website
Equinor, Norway’s state oil company has announced its plan to build the largest hydrogen production facility in the world near Hull in the UK. This facility will be equipped with carbon capture an storage technology. The facility will generate blue hydrogen to be supplied to the Keadby gas power plant in Lincolnshire, which will use it to generate electricity. This will make it the first large-scale power plant to generate electricity by exclusively using renewable sources of energy.
Equinor’s facility will enable it to triple its hydrogen production in the UK. The company has confirmed that in addition to this plant, there are plans to build another hydrogen production facility in the Humber Industrial Zone of 1,200MW capacity to meet the needs of the Keadby gas power plant. The company has stated that without carbon capture and storage technology, there was no possible way to realise the goals laid out in the Paris Agreement.
Equinor and SSE have also collaborated on another blue hydrogen project this year. A hydrogen production facility of 600MW capacity will generate hydrogen from fossil fuel gas and remove the carbon generated in the process using an attached carbon capture and storage facility. The hydrogen will be supplied to the Saltend Chemicals Park and power station.
For carbon capture and storage technology to truly make a meaningful impact on the carbon footprint of any country, a significant scale-up of investment and infrastructure is urgently required. The Global CCS Institute, a think tank has reported that the current capacity of CCS projects across the world will have to grow by 100 times to meet global climate targets. This translates into an investment of almost €550 billion to €1 trillion over the next 30 years. Brad Page, the institute’s chief executive, said: “The necessary investment far exceeds what governments are willing to provide, so policymakers will need to play a role in enabling very large-scale private sector capital. Investing around $1tn over almost 30 years is well within the capacity of the private sector which invested almost $2tn in the energy sector in 2018 alone.”
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