Kwasi Kwarteng, the former Minister for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and who now serves as the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, came to visit Grimsby to learn more about the Gigastack project.
The Gigastack project aims to make hydrogen production more economical and better for the environment. It’s led by a group of companies, including Orsted, Phillips 66 Limited and Sheffiled-based ITM Power. Between them, they have envisioned a type of technology that will produce hydrogen in a much more economical manner than it’s done now. Mr. Kwarteng has described Grimsby as “absolutely central” to the government’s mission of cleaning up the country’s heavy industry.
What I’ve learned from this project so far is that there’s different types of hydrogen. There’s black or grey hydrogen, produced from carbon production and there’s blue and green hydrogen, which comes from renewable energies. The Gigastack trial will see how much green hydrogen can be produced. The energy is created from Orsted’s offshore wind turbines before going to the Gigastack system itself based at Phillips 66 and then ITM Power, which then turns that water into hydrogen.
Projects like Gigastack are hugely beneficial to the Grimsby area as they come with the opportunity of new and green jobs and careers. My job as an MP is to raise awareness of these opportunities. More work needs to be done to get ordinary people in Grimsby to realise that they need to prepare themselves for these jobs. People in Grimsby say to me that they want good jobs and with the Gigastack project, we have those high quality jobs on our doorstep.
Mr. Kwarteng’s visit was to discover more about the project from its three partners, with a view to doing a trial run of the project for around a year. Once the results of that trial have been produced, we can look into scaling up the Gigastack project on an industrial scale. This is a really exciting project for Grimsby and could be a huge game changer for the area.
