Energy group BP announced a plan to construct the biggest hydrogen plant in the United Kingdom as part of its efforts to increase clean fuel production and cut carbon emissions. The plant will be built in Teesside in northern England and will have a capacity of 1 GW. It will account for a fifth of Britain’s hydrogen capacity target of 5 GW by 2030.
The project, called H2Teesside, will produce blue hydrogen which is extracted from natural gas in which the CO2 emissions are captured and stored. BP has started a feasibility study to evaluate technologies that can capture up to 98% of the carbon emitted by H2Teesside. The company plans to capture up to 2 million tons/year of CO2 from H2Teesside and store it below the North Sea.
Hydrogen has been long touted to replace fossil fuels. However, the current industry standard to produce hydrogen is steam-methane reforming which extracts hydrogen from coal or natural gas while emitting CO and CO2. Hydrogen produced from this process is called grey hydrogen. Blue hydrogen is also made with the same process but the resulting carbon emissions are captured and stored.
Green hydrogen is the cleanest hydrogen. It is produced by extracting hydrogen from water through a process called electrolysis using renewable power. Meanwhile, turquoise hydrogen is produced from natural gas through pyrolysis. This process results in a solid carbon as a byproduct that can be used for many applications. Green and turquoise hydrogen production are still relatively small scale.
