The aim is for the plant to play a significant role in that energy future through a combination of blue and green hydrogen, offshore wind power, nuclear and carbon storage.

John Aldersey-Williams is a senior project manager with Progressive Energy, one of the companies leading the work streams in the project, who was a speaker at the recent EEEGR Southern North Sea 2022 event.

In an interview with Insight Energy at the event he summed up the importance of the project: “The Bacton Energy Hub as a project represents a very strong future for the Bacton Gas Terminal in the context of the whole net zero agenda: delivering low carbon hydrogen to probably London and the south East and possibly the East Midlands from gas resources in the North Sea and from electricity resources in the North Sea for the next decades.

“Bacton is extremely well-situated because it has the access to gas which you can make blue hydrogen from, it has potential access to electricity from offshore windfarms and it has fantastic pipeline connections to major demand centres in London and the South East and the East Midlands to export that hydrogen, to sell it later on. And finally, it also has access to structures in the North Sea that you can put the carbon dioxide which you produce from making the hydrogen back into so it is a zero emissions project.”

The project is at an early stage, having only been announced publicly in June of last year and its scale, its significance and potential are little known outside of the energy sector. Mr Aldersey-Williams said: “We’ve got a lot to do still. It is an emerging idea, it came as an initial initiative from the Oil and Gas Authority, recently renamed the North Sea Transition Authority – they were saying what can we do with Bacton in the future?

“So, we’ve been working on this as a group of interested companies for a year or so but we’re only beginning now to engage publicly and say here is the opportunity for Bacton. But it is a very significant opportunity and you will be hearing more.”

Given the early stage of the project, he does not want to overstate its significance. He said: “It is one of a number of projects that are delivering slightly different aspects of the transition to the net zero economy.

“Bacton’s uniqueness is that it is a low carbon hydrogen production hub, the other clusters you might have heard about are about capturing carbon dioxide from industrial processes. What’s going to happen at Bacton is the production of hydrogen which is a fantastic fuel for replacing natural gas for your domestic heating and cooking and all of the purposes we use natural gas for now.”

Given the international energy security situation and the demand for other energy alternatives to Russian gas following the country’s invasion of Ukraine, there is a demand for new secure sources of energy now.

But Mr Aldersley-Williams said: “We’re probably going as fast as we can; these are major, major projects, multi-hundred-million-pound capital projects. They will inevitably take a certain amount of time to get consented and engineered and designed and built. We are not going to be able to change the energy picture in East Anglia in a year or three years, we hope to be producing hydrogen by 2030 is the goal of the project.”

One of the notable features of the Bacton Energy Hub is the range of companies working on it. They include Sumitomo Corporation, Xodus, Petrofac and Hydrogen East in addition to Progressive Energy.

Tim Eggar, chair of the North Sea Transition Authority, who also spoke at the SNS2022 event said: “Cooperation is critical and in particular locally Bacton Energy Hub is probably the most exciting opportunity to bring together traditional oil and gas, wind, carbon capture usage and storage, possibly hydrogen production.

“It’s a really exciting opportunity and what we need to do is to ensure that local industry rises to the opportunity; a lot of progress has been made, we need more.”