BP Plans Big Investment in Green Hydrogen in UK

British oil giant BP announced on Monday that it plans to build a large scale green hydrogen plant in North Eastern England that could deliver up to 500 megawatt electrical input of hydrogen production by 2030.

HyGreen Teesside, as the project is called, would be BP’s first green hydrogen project in the UK. The company is also exploring green hydrogen projects at its refineries in other European countries including the Netherlands, Germany and Spain.  

“Low carbon ‎hydrogen will be essential in decarbonizing hard-to-abate industrial sectors including heavy transport,”  said Louise Jacobsen Plutt, bp’s senior vice president for hydrogen and CCUS. “This is exactly the type of energy we want to ‎create and more importantly deliver.”

Hydrogen is being touted as the fuel of the future as it is seen as a credible and environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuels. When hydrogen is burned it doesn’t emit greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide or methane. Green hydrogen is hydrogen that is produced by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen with electricity (which can be produced from renewable sources such as solar and wind energy). This way of creating hydrogen does not create any additional green house gases.

As the fuel produced by hydrogen is both powerful and efficient, interest in its potential as a low carbon alternative has skyrocketed. Many of the oil industry giants have announced plans or are actively investing in hydrogen technology.

A study of over 1,000 oil and gas executives by consulting firm DNV GL, for instance, found that more than half (52%) of senior oil and gas professionals expect hydrogen to play a significant role in the energy mix by 2030. A fifth of those surveyed were already active in the hydrogen market.

The British government is backing hydrogen technology as part of its plans to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

In a  strategy document published in August, the UK government set a goal to achieve 5 gigawatts of production capacity by 2030 and announced a string of subsidies and funding that would be available to accelerate the development and commercialization of low carbon technologies.

A final decision on BP’s Teesside Green Hydrogen investment plan is expected in 2023.