Safety is our number one priority at Northern Gas Networks, when we’re keeping 2.7 million homes and businesses safe and warm 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Whether our network continues to carry natural gas, or a low carbon fuel like hydrogen, safety will remain at the heart of everything we do.

Redcar

In March 2023, at the invitation of the UK government, we submitted a proposal for a Hydrogen Village Trial (HVT) to convert 2,000 homes on the Redcar gas network to hydrogen.

Supporting the submission were two draft safety cases and three draft quantitative risk assessments written by an independent assurance and risk management consultancy, which set out how the risk of a hydrogen gas network could be safely managed.

Like all industries responsible for safety, robust risk assessments and mitigation measures form an essential part of gas network management that ensure millions of gas customers stay safe and connected.

Through proposed mitigation measures – more stringent than those being used in current European heating trials – the draft Redcar safety documents show the risk of a hydrogen gas network would have been lower than that of the existing natural gas network.

We shared the mitigation measures with Redcar customers as part of the extensive engagement programme we conducted, visited residents at home, and held drop-ins at our Hub on the high street, to ensure customers with any concerns could talk to our engineering team.

The Redcar project was then cancelled in December 2023 due to a lack of available green hydrogen to support the trial.

EIR request

We received an Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) Request from an NGO relating to our HVT submission and its supporting draft safety cases.

While we shared some of the elements of our proposal, we declined to share the safety documents, because they were draft, outdated, and carried a high risk of highly complex technical information being misinterpreted or used to spread misinformation.

A determination by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) means we will be publishing these draft safety documents.

The ICO acknowledges in its decision notice that these documents are in draft form and do not need to be disclosed as part of an EIR request. However, the ICO has asked us to disclose them in the public interest.

While we are happy to comply with the ICO’s decision and provide a transparent response, we respectfully disagree with the ICO that there is any public interest served by disclosing these drafts.

In our view, disclosure creates a risk of complex – and now superseded – technical information being used out of context.

Safety was the very core of the Redcar project, and we were committed to being transparent with Redcar customers in terms of the proposed measures we would have used to keep them safe.

To suggest otherwise would misrepresent the facts.

Conversion of the Redcar gas network to hydrogen would only have taken place once the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) was satisfied with its safety case.

All mitigation measures and technical evidence contained in the published draft safety documentation remains bespoke to the Redcar trial, and is not being considered by the HSE, in relation to a government decision on hydrogen for heat.