At Hazardex Live 2024, Lloyd Mitchell from National Gas will discuss the FutureGrid project which is the first of many steps towards a full-scale conversion of the existing National Transmission System (NTS) to transport hydrogen. The project involves constructing a test facility from decommissioned assets that will be used to carry out a wide range of hydrogen tests in an offline environment, to demonstrate its effect on our assets, as well as the operation of our network.

Hydrogen provides a major opportunity for the UK with the potential to decarbonise industry, transport, heat and power applications whilst ensuring the UK maintains a diverse and resilient energy system. The most cost-effective way to achieve this is to make use of the extensive gas transmission infrastructure in the UK which already links key industrial clusters in the UK and has a world-class safety record.

Although hydrogen is similar in many ways to natural gas it poses unique safety challenges and so National Gas have embarked on an extensive programme of work to understand the risks posed by hydrogen and how these might be managed. FutureGrid builds on years of research to demonstrate how gas transmission assets will perform in a realistic environment, gathering valuable data which will form the basis of our hydrogen safety case.

About the author:

Lloyd Mitchell joined National Gas in 2016 as a Pipelines Engineer and quickly identified the opportunity of hydrogen to decarbonise the UK’s Gas Transmission System. Since then he has led numerous innovation projects covering System Architecture, Materials and Asset Compatibility.

In 2021 he Joined the FutureGrid team as Engineering Lead and in 2023 took on the role of managing the Phase 2 project FutureGrid Deblending for Transport. Lloyd is a Chartered Engineer and a member of the IMechE.