The National Transmission System (NTS) provides a resilient supply of natural gas to homes, businesses, and industry across the UK. We’re working on transitioning our network to carry hydrogen and we plan to continue providing a reliable and resilient network following this transition.

Gas leak detection, fire detection and fire suppression systems are critical to protect against fire-related incidents at our compressor stations. These current systems are not fit for use with hydrogen and hydrogen blends, so we need to develop new systems that are appropriate.

We’re running a project looking at the potential alternatives for fire and gas detection and suppression systems for both 100% hydrogen and hydrogen blends. We’re also investigating the modifications that may be required on the current systems.

We’ve conducted a site visit to one of our compressor sites, to survey the existing systems in place and establish a baseline, and we’re looking at the core requirements needed for a system to be suitable for variable hydrogen blend compression.

Alongside this, we’re conducting a technology search looking at solutions currently available on the market, and we’re developing a conceptual design for a hydrogen suitable system, that can be fed into the project plan for the Beta phase of the HyNTS Compression project, for a physical demonstration at the FutureGrid test site.