Equinor
Equinor is a major international energy company, headquartered in Norway. It employs over 22,000 people across thirty-six countries.
Equinor is the largest single supplier of traditional energy to the UK, where it has operated for 40 years.
It provides 25% of the UK’s gas requirements – enough to heat eight million British homes every day – primarily via pipelines from the North Sea to Easington on the East Yorkshire Coast.
The company has bold ambitions to be a net zero business by 2050, with half of its capital expenditure pledged to be invested in low carbon and renewables projects by 2030. The UK is well placed for such investment opportunities, and the Humber is a particular region of focus due to its high concentration of energy emitting industries, its natural geography and geology, and its historical role as the UK’s Energy Estuary.
Equinor is not in the Humber by chance and has a longstanding relationship with the region. In addition to much of its traditional oil and gas supply entering the UK on the East Yorkshire coast, it co-owns Triton Power Station at Saltend Chemicals Park and the Aldbrough Gas Storage facility on the coast, both with SSE Thermal. A large proportion of energy from its offshore windfarms connect to the grid at Creyke Beck to the north of Hull, and Equinor also played a key role in the H21 project which proposed transitioning from natural gas to hydrogen for heating in Leeds and West Yorkshire.
Equinor has partnered alongside well-known British names such as SSE and Centrica to create some of the most exciting low carbon projects in Europe. For example, Equinor and SSE Renewables are responsible for the world’s largest windfarm Dogger Bank located off the Yorkshire coast. Equinor and SSE Thermal also co-own the existing natural gas storage facility at Aldbrough in East Yorkshire, where there are proposals to repurpose and expand the facility to store low carbon hydrogen; and in 2022 jointly purchased Triton Power Station which powers Saltend Chemicals Park, where there are ambitions to transition from natural gas to low carbon hydrogen power.
Equinor is also a partner in the Northern Endurance Partnership, the CO2 infrastructure capturing carbon emissions from across both the Humber and Teesside and safely storing it in an aquifer under the North Sea. This infrastructure enables the East Coast Cluster, which was selected by Government to be one of the first carbon capture and storage networks in the UK.
H2H Saltend is Equinor’s flagship project in the Humber, a 600-megawatt low carbon hydrogen production plant with carbon capture, which offers to reduce the site’s CO2 emissions by nearly one million tonnes annually, representing a 30% reduction in the Saltend Chemicals Park’s total current carbon emissions. Equinor is also working on proposals to link this site to other key decarbonisation locations including Easington and Aldbrough via a dedicated hydrogen pipeline.
You can learn more about Equinor on their website at Equinor UK website
