Norway’s Equinor will not be making FIDs on its UK hydrogen projects in the immediate future as it looks to evaluate the viability of the projects.

The company has three key projects in the UK. It is leading the H2H Saltend low-carbon hydrogen facility, which is part of the Zero Carbon Humber project; it is developing a hydrogen power station at Keadby in Lincolnshire with London-listed SSE Thermal; and it is also part of the Northern Endurance Partnership, which will store CO₂ from the Net Zero Teesside and Zero Carbon Humber clusters—now combined to form the East Coast Cluster.

Overall, the firm has a target to produce 1.8GW of clean hydrogen in the UK.

But despite the East Coast Cluster being selected by the UK for the first track of its carbon capture and storage (CCS) competition—which the government hopes will mean commercial deployment from 2025—Equinor’s chief financial officer, Ulrica Fearn, would not lay out a timetable for Equinor’s investments on a third quarter results call.

“There is a lot of work to do before we mature the project and can give exact timings,” says Fearn. “We need to develop a new market, understand market risk and the technologies we need to deploy.”

“We need to develop a new market” Fearn, Equinor

However, Equinor is making investments elsewhere in its low-carbon portfolio. The firm is implementing a joint operations centre for the wind farms in which it has interests at Dudgeon, Sheringham Shoal and Dogger Bank.

The firm has a three-part strategy to become net zero by 2050, the first part of which involves reducing emissions from its oil and gas portfolio.

The second part is to accelerate investments in renewables from 4pc of capex in 2020 to about 50pc in 2030, with the goal of reaching an installed renewable capacity of 12-16GW by that date.

The third part of the strategy is CCS and hydrogen. Equinor aims to develop the capacity to store 15-30mn t CO₂ by 2025 and to provide blue hydrogen to between three and five industrial clusters by 2035.

---

Author: Tom Young