A planned new hydrogen plant on the northside of the Humber has secured backing from a raft of companies including Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s chemicals empire Ineos and British Gas owner Centrica. 

Equinor, the Norwegian state-owned energy company, has struck agreements with six companies to explore using hydrogen from its plant due to be built in Saltend at the Port of Hull in Yorkshire.

Equinor hopes to get the 600-megawatt plant up and running by 2026-27, making hydrogen from natural gas with the carbon emissions from production captured and stashed under the North Sea. 

The company is part of the East Coast Cluster, a group of industrial companies around Hull and Middlesbrough which has been prioritised by the Government for support to develop carbon capture networks. 

Triton Power, the electricity generator; rare earths processor Pensana; bioethanol producer Vivergo Fuels; and energy services provider Vital Energi have also signed deals with Equinor.

Equinor submitted plans to the Government on Friday for the planned H2H Saltend hydrogen plant to be part of the Cluster, along with other projects aimed at cutting emissions. 

It claims the Saltend site will be able to cut emissions by about 1m tonnes a year, about 30pc of emissions at the Saltend Chemicals Park, if companies switch to using the fuel instead of natural gas. 

David Brooks, chief executive of Ineos Acetyls, a chemicals division of the company which has a plant on the site, said: “At Ineos, we believe that achieving net zero [carbon emissions] by 2050 is only possible by significantly increasing the use of hydrogen.”

Martin Scargill, managing director of Centrica’s gas storage business, said moving towards using hydrogen at its Easington terminal would “pave the way to provide large-scale, flexible, low carbon energy storage solutions for the UK.”

Governments around the world are counting on hydrogen being produced and used in much greater quantities in the future to cut carbon emissions.