Projects
Rising Pressure Reformer Study
This project will assess the application of Rising Pressure Reformer (RiPR) technology to produce a tuneable blend of biogenic methane and hydrogen supporting the decarbonisation of gas networks. The project will focus on the how control of the gas produced would fit with requirements for network injection and assessing locations for connection.
Stopple-Live trial (Phase 2)
The Stopple technology is a flow stop tool essential for major projects and emergency works across the LTS and NTS gas network. Its capability was tested in 100% hydrogen within a helinite environment in line with LTS Futures parameters as phase 1. This project focuses on validating flow-stopping technology as an additional deliverable with LTS Futures live hydrogen trial on the Granton to Grangemouth pipeline as a welded tee and hot-tapping operations is already being carried out. The trial will confirm the Stopple train’s effectiveness as a double-block and bleed solution for a 100% hydrogen system which will be available for the UK Gas Network. The findings will provide critical insights into the safe and efficient operation of the hydrogen networks supporting the transition from natural gas to hydrogen.
Hydrogen Permeation through the Oxide Layer Phase 1
This project is looking to address uncertainties surrounding LTS pipeline materials by investigating the effect of the oxide layer on hydrogen permeation rate for steel pipelines. This project will also investigate the formation of an oxide layer inside the pipe at different temperatures as well as how the microstructure of the pipeline steel and condition of the oxide layer affect permeation for different grades of steel. It is critical this relation is better understood as these uncertainties are currently hindering our ability to fully and accurately assess the repurposing of the LTS. The outcomes of this project have the potential to increase cost-savings and improve confidence in the existing network to carry hydrogen including blends.
Open Maps
This project has enormous potential to benefit all customers in vulnerable situations as it will provide accurate assessment of communities and all interested parties to provide suitable support to the area. This will enable GDN DNO Electricity transmission and Gas transmission partners such as community groups to specifically target areas with relevant support this will allow project partners to accurately provide information which will be bespoke to the specific needs of the area such as Carbon Monoxide awareness Priority Services Register messaging increasing awareness and registrations.
It will allow GDN’s or other service providers to enlist support for VCMA BAU or NIA projects directly addressing the needs of communities rather than adopting a broad-brush approach which has been the traditional approach. This system will present itself as the very foundation for future years projects and investments specifically as we progress through the energy system transition which will help address the very real and ever-changing needs of communities and vulnerable customers groups by putting data at the front and centre of future decision making for GDN’s and partners.
Enhancement of the anaerobic digestion process for biomethane production
The UK Government recognised that domestic biomethane production can play a significant role in decarbonising energy supplies. However biomethane production plants face technical and operational challenges. Currently the content of biomethane within biogas produced from the anaerobic digestion (AD) process is often only around 50%. This partial conversion results in lower yields for AD operators and an increase in costly gas scrubbing requirements. The increased presence of impurity gases also increases requirement for propanation to increase the calorific value high in both cost and carbon footprint.
This project seeks to address these challenges through the injection of green hydrogen into the AD process in specific quantities and at specific times to achieve greater conversion of carbon dioxide to biomethane within the acetogenesis stage of the AD process thereby increasing the yield whilst reducing the need for gas scrubbing and propanation.
NextGen Electrolysis – Wastewater to Green Hydrogen Beta
Wales and West Utilities are partnering with HydroStar Welsh Water and NGED to look at two demonstrator projects required from new electrolyser systems and the associated electrolyte that ensures resilience of hydrogen supply across the network giving best value for money and energy security within WWU’s network along with other UK wide Gas Distribution Network (GDN) customers.
Current electrolysers focus on stack-efficiency and hydrogen purity without considering real-world manufacturing and operational constraints and the high costs associated. This project focusses on utilising impurified-water e.g. rainwater storm-overflow and industrial process wastewater as feedstock which reduces operational constraints and costs for customers whilst enabling wide-scale uptake of low-carbon hydrogen.
Decentralised Alliance for South West Hydrogen (DASH)
Early cluster projects will not benefit I&C customers that are located away from industrial clusters and are traditionally more distributed in nature. These customers are unlikely to have access to hydrogen infrastructure developed through the primary industrial clusters. This presents the need for an alternative solution.
This project will explore the concept of how a larger number of low-volume hydrogen producers can support I&C customers in the absence of natural ‘clustering’ and high-volume production by using the South West region of WWU’s network as a case study. This will be done by exploring the whole systems concept of a gas network which is driven by distributed green hydrogen production at strategic locations where there is access to both gas and electricity grid infrastructure.
Demonstrating Downstream Procedures For Hydrogen
This project involves a comprehensive set of tasks aimed at implementing and validating a domestic safety system for hydrogen use including excess flow valves.
Biomethane Islands
To achieve decarbonisation targets all gas network operators in the UK need to demonstrate that the gas network can safely technically and economically facilitate the distribution of low-carbon gases (biomethane and hydrogen). In response to this challenge SGN aim to review the feasibility of the formation of biomethane islands in their Scotland area of operation. The outputs of this project will establish a business model for the optimisation of biomethane injection and formation of biomethane islands across the UK’s gas network. A feasibility study will address key areas including regulatory technical environmental social and commercial aspects as well as comprehensively assess the viability of developing Biomethane Islands. The outcome of the feasibility study will be to inform decision-making regarding project implementation. This will be captured and delivered in a comprehensive report and financial model of the business case. These islands will serve as models for sustainable living demonstrating the feasibility and benefits of a circular economy approach to energy production and waste management and offer a low disruption option for the decarbonisation of all classes of gas consumers - Industrial Commercial and Domestic.
Achieving Future Hydrogen Demand
This project constitutes a research study assessing the future demand for hydrogen across SGN regions and the role SGN infrastructure could play in facilitating access to hydrogen.
As the UK transitions to a low-carbon energy future gas networks must consider how strategic utilisation of existing assets can be realised. Using SGN’s extensive gas network to carry hydrogen instead of natural gas would be a major step towards decarbonisation. This repurposing necessitates an understanding of both the technical feasibility of repurposing pipelines to carry hydrogen and future hydrogen demand requirements.
SHINE Non-Electric Boiler
Power outages are a regular occurrence in Great Britian with average annual customer minutes lost in Great Britain range between 31.57 minutes 51.4 minutes depending on the Distribution Network Operator License Area (Statista 2021). This is of course not evenly distributed with outages varying from a few minutes up to more than a week in more extreme circumstances. Similarly single outages can affect a single property or several thousand properties depending on the cause. This project will aim to develop a low-cost user-friendly solution whereby customers in vulnerable situations will still be able to use their gas heated boiler as well as LPG and oil heated boilers in the event of a power outage.
Hybrid Heat Systems (HHS) Acceleration Route
Project will deliver strategic analysis and recommendations to support the accelerated adoption of Hybrid Heat Systems (HHS) in GB. This includes assessing technology options commercial models stakeholder perspectives and system integration pathways. The work will result in actionable insights clear positioning of HHS within the wider decarbonisation strategy.
Decentralised System Resilience
This project constitutes a research study investigating the opportunities for gas network infrastructure to support storage and balancing in a decentralised UK energy system. The research will consider how a decentralised system might look in the UK from now until 2030 and onto 2050. An evaluation will be made of how other countries are approaching decentralisation identifying examples the UK could draw on. Consideration will be given to how grid balancing will be achieved across various scenarios of peak demand and particular geographic locations in the UK and what challenges and opportunities this presents to gas networks.
Asset Records Readiness for Hydrogen
The project will evaluate and deliver a plan that ensures our asset records are suitably complete to support the net zero transition.
The project will reduce uncertainty and risk and provide a more realistic proximation of asset data.
The HSE has indicated that it will be unable to support a network’s hydrogen safety case until they receive “a clear plan for checking unknown assets and how networks will ensure that only suitable materials are present in the network”. This includes our transmission pipelines.
Additionally for the marginal extra effort it would be prudent to ensure the completeness of our asset records is sufficient for us to either plan for the conversion to hydrogen or decommission sections as users switch to other heating technologies.
Forecaster for Embedded Generation (FEmGE)
Gas networks supply embedded power stations that support the electricity network. These embedded generators can fire up without any warning to GDNs and is causing significant challenges to gas networks.
GDNs are required to submit hourly gas demand nominations to National Gas for each offtake point within specified time deadlines.
Embedded generators are small. They are not included in the UNC’s requirements to notify their GDN of intended offtake activity due to their size being below the threshold for NExAs (network exit agreements). Despite this GDNs must include the demand from these embedded generators in their nominations to ensure there is sufficient gas within their network. This causes numerous challenges for SGN and other GDNs.
GDNs’ current forecasting process does not specifically forecast embedded gas generation and current models do not take inputs from the electricity market. Embedded generators act in a variety of electricity markets yet GDNs don’t have visibility of this demand.
It is anticipated that additional embedded generators will connect in the coming months/years as the demand for electricity increases.The challenge of not having knowledge of embedded generator’s demand and its potential to contribute to a storage shortage has been acknowledged by both EGRIT (Electricity and Gas Resilience Task Group) and NESO (National Energy System Operator). The benefits of creating a notification platform supported by a ML engine are various. Namely to develop an ML-enabled forecasting tool to predict gas demand from embedded generators with increased accuracy as delivery time approaches. In addition to create a notification platform to improve real-time visibility of embedded generator activities within the electricity and gas networks.
This NIA project aims to progress the FEmGE forecasting tool from TRL 1 to TRL 7 delivering a fully functional MVP. NGN will be funding this project to the value of £92333 and SGN to £184666 of the total of £276999.
H2 Housing Design
This project will explore ventilation and explosion relief requirements for housing currently used on the gas network for pressure regulating installations (PRIs). Housings currently provide security from a range of factors from weather to vandalism while also providing the necessary relief requirements in the event of an emergency. The understanding of these requirements for Natural Gas has been developed however work conducted in the IGEM TD/13 hydrogen supplement did not fully address whether these design specifications are suitable for use with Hydrogen. This multi-stage project will first explore the design specifications listed in industry standards (IGEM/TD/13 GIS/PRS/35 SGN/SP/CE/10 etc) and understand which of these may be appropriate and which may require redesign. The latter stage of this project will take the design specifications deemed to be unsuitable for use with hydrogen and conduct testing to develop revised design specifications which would provide the necessary relief requirements.
B-Linepack+ Alpha
Linepack flexibility is key for Gas Transmission to provide system resilience by management of swings within operational limits. In a hydrogen world we know our energy content per km of linepack will decrease by up to 76%. Therefore embedded resilience systems in the form of lined rock shafts are being investigated to supplement loss in linepack capability. We envision systems if implemented for hydrogen transmission to act similar to how now decommissioned natural gas holders were utilised for operational flexibility pressure regulation supply/demand mismatch management load balancing emergency backup and production buffering.
Gas transmission asset resilience through network transitions Discovery
As the energy system transitions away from unabated natural gas and parts of the gas network are either decommissioned or repurposed to support the UK’s net zero goals there is an increased risk of unintentional third-party damage to the network. Any supply interruptions to the transmission network would directly impact security of supply across the country and have a significant cost to customers including power generators industry and domestic users. This project will investigate the benefits of moving from expensive low frequency manual network inspections to innovative AI assisted surveillance technologies in combination with satellite imagery and drones.
Finding the Hidden Vulnerable
This innovation project proposal is centred on trialling the development of a predictive model to identify customers in vulnerable situations whose heat comes from Cadent delivered gas that are missing out on the protections that the Priority Service Register (PSR) brings because they are “hidden” behind a non-domestic supply contract. The aim of the predictive model would be to aid Cadent to find these customers so that it can be ensured that they receive the support that they need in the event of an interruption to supply.
Integrity Management of Gaseous Carbon Dioxide Pipelines
Existing defect assessments and repair methodologies are aligned with the P/11 P/20 and PM/DAM1 management procedures and are adopted to inspect assess and repair the pipelines for defects and take suitable measures to reduce them. However the scope and applicability of these assessment and repair methodologies in the presence of gaseous phase carbon dioxide remain uncertain. The key challenges which the project aims to address are:
- Will existing repair techniques such as epoxy shell welded shells composite wraps gouge dressing etc. be suitable for transmission of gaseous phase carbon dioxide?
- What are the different defects we may encounter or consider hazardous in the presence of carbon dioxide? What are the impacts of carbon dioxide on each defect type? And how much does water/corrosion exacerbate this?
- Have the mechanisms of failure for each defect type changed after introducing carbon dioxide?
- Can we implement the assessment and repair methodologies safely? Are the techniques safe and suitable for the pipeline operations and maintenance teams?
The project seeks to answer the above in addition to understanding the types and extent of repairs across the NTS and review the impact of carbon dioxide on the effectiveness of these inspection assessment and mitigation technologies.