Notice

Industrial Fuel Switching Programme, Phase 2: summaries of successful projects

Updated 28 June 2023

Phase 2 of the NZIP Industrial Fuel Switching Competition funds the development and demonstration of innovative fuel switch and fuel switch enabling solutions, to help industry move from high to low carbon fuels, such as hydrogen, electrification, or biomass/waste. This is designed to accelerate the deployment of such solutions across UK industry, contributing towards achieving net zero by 2050.

With up to £6 million awarded per project and combined funding of around £52.5 million, the following 13 projects will develop and demonstrate novel fuel switch enabling technologies within a range of industrial sectors, including glass, aluminium, food and beverage, paper, and others.

Demonstrating hydrogen in the ceramics sector

• Led by: British Ceramic Confederation Ltd
• Location: Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England
• Awarded SBRI Funding: £5,999,366.60

This project will deliver the first ever demonstrations of 100% hydrogen firing technologies for the 2 main types of kiln (batch and continuous / tunnel) used prominently across the >150 manufacturing sites of the British Ceramic Confederation’s 90 member companies, thus providing a key route to help decarbonise the UK ceramic sector by 2040 (pending availability of sufficient volumes of hydrogen to each site). A bespoke hydrogen pilot kiln will be hosted at Glass Futures Ltd, with hydrogen trials on commercial industrial kilns at 3 BCC member sites.

Project NEO

• Led by: Burton’s Foods Limited
• Location: St Albans, Hertfordshire, England
• Awarded SBRI Funding: £3,318,417.62

Industrial biscuit baking in the UK mostly uses natural gas fired ovens to produce the flavour, texture, and appearance that consumers enjoy at an acceptable price. The efficiency of existing electric ovens is too low to mitigate the adverse operating cost impact of switching from natural gas to electricity. However, following a comprehensive feasibility study and laboratory validation of key technology, a high efficiency electric oven design has been developed, providing significant decarbonisation potential through fuel switching from natural gas to electricity.

Led by Burton’s Foods Limited, this project will demonstrate the commercial viability of this switch, by building and trialling a pilot line on an industrial site. The project will also assess the impact of the switch on product cost, quality, and production rates, enabling lifecycle assessments to be completed and trials to be carried out for other biscuit types moving forward, as well as de-risking investment in fuel switching production lines from natural gas to electricity.

Demonstrating fuel switching industrial heating from gas with electric storage boilers

• Led by: Caldera Heat Batteries Limited
• Location: Fareham, Hampshire, England
• Awarded SBRI Funding: £4,325,391.00

Caldera’s Storage Boilers include their patented heat cell technology. A feasibility study proved these can produce 180°C heat or 10bar steam, making them suitable to fuel switch 8% of global industrial heat demand. This project follows on from that study, building and demonstrating a first-of-a-kind 4MWh Storage Boiler, converting low cost, low carbon electricity into heat, which can be stored and then released as steam or hot-water for industrial processes. The result will be a scalable solution with operation and costs that are similar to a typical industrial-scale fossil fuel boiler but without the carbon emissions.

Throughout the project, manufacturing processes will also be researched and optimised to minimise costs of production, installation, running and maintenance, with the aim of demonstrating how to switch industry to low carbon fuels at an affordable price. Even with only a 5% share of the global market for industrial heat in the temperature range 100–200°C, Caldera estimates carbon savings of 197MtCO2e by 2050.

Essity – HyNet industrial fuel switching

• Led by: Essity UK Limited
• Location: Skelmersdale, Lancashire, England
• Awarded SBRI Funding: £2,204,830.00

An important element of the paper production process is the drying phase, where heat is used to remove moisture from the product. At present, the heat is primarily derived from natural gas, with associated carbon emissions. Like natural gas, hydrogen can deliver large quantities of high-grade heat, offering the potential to replace natural gas without fundamental process changes. Hydrogen also has the key benefit of being a low carbon fuel, with potential to dramatically reduce the emissions associated with Essity’s operations. This project, led by Essity and in partnership with Progressive Energy, will address evidence gaps identified during a Phase 1 project by demonstrating the use of hydrogen in paper manufacture at Essity Tawd in Skelmersdale, on live manufacturing equipment. This will provide Essity with the confidence it needs to deploy low carbon hydrogen as soon as it is available.

Demonstration of electrically charged thermal storage as a decarbonisation route for industrial steam boilers at Annandale Distillery

• Led by: Exergy3 Ltd
• Location: Edinburgh, The City of Edinburgh, Scotland
• Awarded SBRI Funding: £3,607,902.27

The project will develop and demonstrate thermal energy storage, taking electricity from the grid to store energy in dense ceramic oxide bricks with resistive heating elements, at a maximum of 1200°C. Exergy3’s novel technology uses a solid-to-air heat exchanger to heat gas which exits the system, driving industrial processes. The project will replace the steam produced by a gas-burning boiler at the Annandale Distillery, with a heat recovery boiler, driven by the thermal storage system. In combination with a zero-carbon electricity grid and renewable sources of energy, this technology could result in a fully decarbonised distillery production process, whilst also contributing to grid flexibility.

Amburn Phase 2

• Led by: Flogas Britain Ltd
• Location: Leicester, Leicestershire, England
• Awarded SBRI Funding: £3,475,151.78

Currently around 4.5 million tonnes of oil is consumed in the off-mains industrial market annually in the UK. These energy intensive processes contribute to point source emissions of 14.2 MtCO2/y. Businesses and industries in these locations often cannot rely solely on electricity to satisfy their process heating requirements. Green ammonia is a promising alternative fuel for these applications. Ammonia requires only modest temperatures and pressures to liquify, which increases its volumetric energy density to above the levels achieved by other e-fuels. This enables ammonia to be distributed and stored inexpensively, using infrastructure that has been well established in the fertiliser sector. However, technical barriers in the combustion of ammonia have meant that ammonia boilers are not yet available on the market.

The Amburn Phase 2 project is seeking to demonstrate a 1 MW ammonia-fed steam boiler with support from Cardiff University’s world leading ammonia research group. The system will be a first-of-its-kind and prove that ammonia combustion is a technically viable option to decarbonise off-grid industrial heating. The planned demonstration will be ~4 weeks long, to prove the system works in continuous operation.

HyCrem - Decarbonisation of a working crematorium

• Led by: FT Pipeline Systems Ltd
• Location: Worthing, West Sussex, England
• Awarded SBRI Funding: £1,168,500.88

This project will demonstrate the potential for deep decarbonisation of a working crematorium by fuel switching to hydrogen. In the UK, 79% of people are now cremated, with around 470,000 people cremated each year across the UK’s 300 crematoria. 99% of these crematoria use natural gas. Annual emissions from gas use are nearly 70,000 tCO2e/year across the UK crematorium industry. Worthing Crematorium is the third busiest crematorium in the country, consuming 2.3GWh gas last year with an associated carbon footprint of 425 tCO2e.

Worthing Borough Council recently conducted a feasibility study in decarbonising its crematorium, which showed that a switch to electric cremators would carry with it some initial technical and financial challenges. As a potential alternative to electrification, the project partners (FT Pipeline Systems, Worthing Borough Council, DFW Europe, the University of Brighton, Ricardo AEA and Net Zero Associates) will demonstrate at scale that natural gas can be replaced by hydrogen in a working crematorium and still maintain the same level of service.

Demonstrating the viability of low-cost biofuels for glass and ceramics manufacturing

• Led by: Glass Futures Ltd
• Location: Sheffield, West Yorkshire, England
• Awarded SBRI Funding: £5,999,959.00

Led by Glass Futures, this project aims to demonstrate the viability of lower cost, sustainable waste derived fuels for the decarbonisation of firing processes across the glass and ceramics sectors. The project will identify and demonstrate a range bioderived fuels at 5 industrial glass/ceramics sites: 1. Container glass plants: OI, Ardagh, Encirc; 2. Float glass plant: NSG; 3. Ceramics: DSF. The project will also develop detailed economic understanding of the fuels, their availability and sustainability, as well as their compatibility with CCUS technologies.

The fuels demonstrated within this project have potential to help the UK achieve Net Zero 2050 targets, providing a quick, low CAPEX route to decarbonise existing furnaces/kilns, as well as a longer-term route to enable carbon negative industrial manufacturing through use of CCUS. The fuels also provide a potential solution to many off-cluster manufacturing sites using high temperature combustion processes, where the costs to develop the necessary infrastructure to provide other low carbon fuels (e.g. hydrogen, electricity) are likely to be prohibitively high, but where local bioderived waste streams are often abundant.

Rapid and dynamic electric-boosting of glass furnaces (RaD-Electric)

• Led by: Glass Futures Ltd
• Location: Sheffield, West Yorkshire, England
• Awarded SBRI Funding: £5,999,904.00

Electric boosting has the potential to reduce the annual UK glass industry CO2 emissions (1.5 Mt) by 56% and could also offer up to 200 MWh of load balancing capability to the UK electrical grid, providing energy resilience. Led by Glass Futures in partnership with glass manufacturers Guardian Glass and Encirc, this project will develop and run a series of models to understand the optimal operating configurations of electrodes to achieve up to 80% electric boost through installing and demonstrating a high-electric boost system on the new Glass Futures pilot-furnace to assess melting efficiency and impacts on product quality and production rates.

To improve demand-side response, automated control systems for rapidly switching between combustion and electric will be developed and trialled on industrial container and float glass furnaces. The project will also develop an understanding of the timescales and costs to upgrade grid networks so that glass plants can transition to electric-hybrid furnaces, providing greater insights to help transition the wider glass industry towards super-boost hybrid furnaces by 2040.

Demonstration of next-gen thermoplastic composite pipes, enabling industrial fuel switching to hydrogen (H2IFS2-demo)

• Led by: Hive Composites Limited
• Location: Coalville, Leicestershire, England
• Awarded SBRI Funding: £2,436,500.00

The demand for “hydrogen ready” infrastructure is set to grow in the next decade as we transition to a low carbon economy, and pipelines will be the principal means of distributing hydrogen in industrial sectors. However, hydrogen causes embrittlement in steel pipes, reducing the safety of new and existing assets. Steel pipes can be replaced by thermoplastic composite pipes (TCP) for hydrogen applications. TCPs can be manufactured continuously and spooled on drums in lengths up to 1 km, then unspooled for fast installation. They are typically employed in the oil and gas industries and are attractive to the end user because of their ease of installation.

Current manufacturing methods for high quality TCPs are laborious, energy intensive, slow, and require the pipe to be reprocessed several times to add the reinforcement layers needed to achieve the required burst pressure rating. This project demonstrates HIVE’s novel materials and manufacturing process by installing pipe sections in a test site for the transmission and distribution network. The project will show that HIVE’s TCPs can be manufactured five times faster than traditional thermally fused TCP, do not require reprocessing, and reduce the energy to manufacture the pipeline by >80%, whilst achieving the required pressure ratings (40-100bar) and minimising H2 permeation.

Kellogg’s – HyNet industrial fuel switching

• Led by: Kellogg Company of Great Britain Ltd
• Location: Salford, Greater Manchester, England
• Awarded SBRI Funding: £3,312,673.31

Much of Kellogg’s existing cereal production and manufacturing is fuelled by natural gas. Like natural gas, hydrogen is able to deliver large quantities of high-grade heat, offering the potential to replace natural gas without fundamental process changes. In Phase 1 of the Industrial Fuel Switching Competition, in partnership with Progressive Energy, Kellogg’s assessed the feasibility of replacing natural gas with hydrogen in cereal ovens and boilers at its Trafford Park and Wrexham sites. It also identified the evidence gaps to be addressed before hydrogen can be deployed. This Phase 2 project will fill these gaps by demonstrating the use of hydrogen in cereal manufacture at Trafford Park, first at pilot scale and then on live manufacturing equipment. This will provide Kellogg’s with confidence to switch to, and deploy, low carbon hydrogen as soon as it is available.

Modular approach to decarbonisation of energy for glass: MADE for Glass

• Led by: KEW Projects Limited
• Location: St. Helens, Merseyside, England
• Awarded SBRI Funding: £5,993,614.21

MADE for Glass will demonstrate the decarbonisation of glass production through the installation, integration, and operation of a modular advanced gasification unit. This will gasify non-recyclable waste/ waste wood producing a synthesis gas (syngas) as a low carbon substitute for natural gas and then be co­fired in Pilkington UK’s Greengate Works float furnace. The Phase 2 Demonstration Project will confirm the successful firing of low carbon syngas in a glass furnace whilst understanding the suitability of waste / waste wood derived syngas for use in glass manufacture without compromising glass quality. The project will also validate emissions savings through co­firing syngas and highlight the economic case for fuel switching to waste derived syngas.

Novelis - HyNet industrial fuel switching

• Led by: Novelis UK Limited
• Location: Warrington, Cheshire, England
• Awarded SBRI Funding: £4,649,555.00

Novelis Latchford Locks Works is one of Europe’s largest Used Beverage Can (UBC) recycling plants and closed loop recycling operation for automotive aluminium rolled products with annual recycling capacity of up to 195,000 tonnes. The site uses natural gas burners in its furnaces to remelt scrap aluminium for casting into ingots for use in manufacturing a range of products, including beverage cans and cars. Using natural gas is by far the largest contributor to direct CO2 emissions at Latchford Locks Works and switching to hydrogen fuel would reduce site emissions by approximately 45,000 tonnes of CO2 per annum.

Under Phase 1 of the Industrial Fuel Switching Competition, in partnership with Progressive Energy, Novelis assessed the feasibility of replacement of natural gas with hydrogen in furnaces at Latchford Locks, and identified the evidence gaps that must be addressed before hydrogen can be deployed. This Phase 2 project will address these evidence gaps by demonstrating use of hydrogen in a melting furnace at Latchford Locks, providing Novelis with the confidence it needs to switch to low carbon hydrogen as soon as it is available.