Public Funding for National Gas Transmission PLC

Achieving the European Green Deal target of becoming the world’s first climate-neutral continent by 2050 will require deep cuts to emissions across all aspects of the economy, including the power generation and heating sector. This, combined with the REPowerEU plans, places hydrogen as a clean energy carrier in a unique position. It can be used in, and thereby couple, all sectors like; power&heat, transport and industry. Hydrogen offers long term storage, it can be transported over large distances and it can be produced and used without, or with very low emissions. A central part of the EU climate strategies is the target of domestic renewable hydrogen production of 10 million tons by 2030, in addition to the same amount imported. Large-scale stationary fuel cells in the MW-range should be able to operate on such industrial quality H2 without repurification. They can offer a low-cost clean alternative for both large scale (peak) power and heat production, as well as for small, medium and large-scale back-up power units for the critical infrastructure, thereby also improving the resilience of the energy system. The aim of CLEANER is to develop and demonstrate for more than 5000 hours a >100 kW PEM fuel cell system operating on industrial quality hydrogen.

As natural gas becomes the leading fossil fuel, industrial gas leaks are becoming a major source of climate changing carbon emissions. The SPLICE project assembles a world-leading scientific and industrial consortium to develop and industrialise gas (methane) imagers based on time-correlated single photon counting, one of the early applications of quantum technology. This revolutionary UK technology will make accurate leak measurements at a fraction of existing costs, allowing the global gas industry to control fugitive gas emissions, help save many billions of £, and building a sustainable world leading business that reduces climate change. Shortwave infrared (SWIR) wavelength single photon avalanche detectors (SPADs) are emerging from initial applications to quantum telecommunication networks into new sensing applications, including vehicle lidar. QLM, a start-up out of the University of Bristol and QuantIC, the Quantum Enhanced Imaging Hub, and ID Quantique, the world leader in near IR single photon detection, have used non-cryogenic SWIR SPADs to demonstrate innovative, low-cost, highly sensitive, long range, single-photon lidar gas imagers that see and measure invisible toxic gases. These quantum gas imager prototypes have demonstrated outstanding performance, but the technology remains at prototype level, using individually packaged commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) photonic and optical components and only addressing a single gas, methane, so is not yet ready for industrial use. The SPLICE project will be a major expansion of engineering talent and effort aiming to build the first scalable industrial product to come from the UK's £billion investment in quantum technology. The SPLICE team will innovate this technology into a flexible sensor platform that addresses key customer demands for robust, low cost and industrially qualified products that can simultaneously image multiple greenhouse gases. Commercial photonics experts QLM, IDQ, Compound Semiconductor Application Catapult and Bay Photonics will collaborate to expand the range of critical components, develop new multiple gas designs, start UK development of enabling SPAD detectors with the University of Sheffield, and expand work on new mid-IR quantum sensing architectures that can measure all possible gases with the University of Bristol. Together we will integrate the best of these new designs into compact state-of-the-art packages and develop and qualify complete networked IoT imager products to industry requirements. And then with gas emissions experts at the National Physical Laboratory and natural gas and industrial sensor leaders National Grid, Ametek, and BP we will validate our imagers' capabilities for commercial applications and start to address the multi £100m business opportunity.