The UK’s nearly abandoned floating gas plant that’s the biggest of its kind

The UK’s biggest offshore gas storage facility has been left nearly abandoned as the country gradually ditches fossil fuels.

Rough is located 20 miles off the Yorkshire coast in the North Sea and only accessible by helicopter, unless the weather’s bad – in which case nobody can get there.

The L-shaped facility is made up of three platforms that sprawl out over hundreds of metres, fixed into the seabed and connected by narrow walkways with grates revealing the choppy sea below.

The 40-year-old plant is managed by Centrica, the company that owns British Gas, and its managing director Martin Scargill has admitted it’s “served its purpose”. 

The government’s climate targets mean that gas will be almost entirely removed from the power grid by 2030, keeping just 5 percent as an emergency reserve.

However, Centrica plans to invest billions of pounds into hydrogen instead of gas, reflecting the government’s ambitions of moving from fossil fuels to clean energy sources. 

Rough is still currently being used to provide emergency energy supplies, which come from gas stored under the sea, when others are running short. 

Scargill explained the process, telling Politico: “We’ve got a massive sponge underneath the seabed. You can pump it up to enormously high pressures … And the gas will sit there under very high pressure.

“You can hold an awful lot of gas volume in that rock structure. And it’s a field that’s never been replicated in terms of its ability to store.”

After rejecting government subsidies offered by then-PM Theresa May, Rough became merely a distribution hub before Russian energy supplies dwindled and the facility needed to be partially re-opened.

Now, 40 percent of its storage capacity is filled – the equivalent to 54 billion cubic feet of gas, or six days of UK usage. This is a marked reduction from its peak of 150 billion in 1990.

Scargill said: “Depending on how much you think you’re going to use in a day, [the UK has] somewhere between nine and 12 days [of gas storage]. And Rough provides half of that at its current capacity.”

In comparison, Germany has 89 days of gas available in storage, France has 203, and the Netherlands 123.