This project will utilise McKinsey’s powerful hydrogen and natural gas balancing and optimisation tool, Navigator™, to analyse hydrogen demand, supply, storage and import developments across SGN’s networks in Scotland and the South-East of England. This project will detail and assess indigenous and international hydrogen supply options and projects under development and quantify the supply required in time to ensure the Energy System Transition of the gas networks to 100% hydrogen can be delivered in an affordable, practical and energy secure way. This project is critical in the system transformation planning of the conversion of SGN’s networks.

Benefits

This project has the potential to deliver significant benefits to SGN and the customers supplied through its networks. The project scope, detailed later, outlines in details the expected project outputs, which together will provide critical inputs to SGN's System Transformation planning. The delivery of the Energy System Transition to 100% hydrogen, thereby developing a decarbonised energy vector through the gas networks, has the potential to provide to customers and policy makers, a low disruption, low cost, safe and practical pathway for the decarbonisation of heat, industry, and electricity generation, whilst concurrently bringing to market a ubiquitous energy source for use in new markets such as transport.

This project’s modelling outputs will assess the development of potential blue hydrogen production, green hydrogen production, and hydrogen storage across SGN’s networks. This will be compared to expected sectoral demand growth to ensure supply developments are sufficient to meet future needs. This project will also assess the emerging global hydrogen import and export market and determine the potential requirement for hydrogen imports to help meet network demands post transition to 1000% hydrogen. This project will provide confidence in SGN’s strategy and help streamline it. This will in turn provide greater confidence to prospective producers and stakeholders as they seek to develop their plans in close collaboration with the gas networks.

At present, hydrogen production is under development in clusters and for individual network locations, with clear knowledge gaps in whole system planning and joining up production, in a similar way the gas networks operate today. This project seeks to address some of these knowledge gaps in relation to security of supply and system balance.