Centurion Project The UK industrial Strategy in action

This project, a first of its scale in Europe, will look at a 100MW electrolyser, producing green hydrogen in the North West.  Green hydrogen is one of the options to decarbonise heat and power at scale in the UK.

Storage at scale will be key to support the development of a hydrogen economy in the future: the energy system needs flexibility to face “ups and downs” in supply and demand.

Hydrogen can be stored safely underground in salt caverns and this will provide significant growth opportunities for the North West.

With its quality salt layer underground, Cheshire has been the place of the latest developments of natural gas storage in the UK. With more than half of the salt cavern capacity of the country, Cheshire can count on a wide range of technical skills, especially in geoscience, to develop new underground energy storage solutions.

Projects are already numerous in the area, demonstrating the ambition of the companies:

•  Stublach natural gas storage extension is currently taking place with the latest caverns delivered to the market by late 2019.
•  Prefeasibility and feasibility studies are currently taking place for hydrogen and compressed air storage in salt caverns, the Centurion project is part of these studies
•  If business case for energy storage is confirmed, significant investments could take place in the early years of next decade, creating hundreds of jobs

Our vision is that an innovative energy storage cluster could develop around existing assets in Cheshire … this is what we, as part of the Cheshire Energy Hub https://energyinnovationdistrict.com/ suggest in the Energy Innovation District we have been proposing to the government.

The recent announcement of BEIS hydrogen supply chain funding is more good news for the country, as working on lowering the cost of low carbon solutions will be key to deliver on our clean growth objectives.

Read more about Project centurion: https://bit.ly/2OyblZE

The Storengy team