Dorset’s first ever hydrogen fuel plant set to revolutionise industry

The Dorset community is set to benefit from the first ever green hydrogen production facility, after £6.5 million in funding was secured.

The Dorset green H2 facility, which will be built at a former landfill site off from Magna Road in Poole called White’s Pitt, is set to be up and running later this year.

This exciting project is expected to produce around 120,000 kilograms of hydrogen annually, which is about enough to fuel the equivalent of 900,000 miles travelled by lorries.

Nathan Ross, the managing director of the project operators Canford Renewable Energy said: “The benefit to the community is a reduction in carbon footprint, improved air quality, less diesel emissions going into the air and economic benefits because of a fairly large project like this.

“It’s important in Dorset because there isn’t really a hydrogen economy at the moment,” he added. “We really hope this will help kickstart the hydrogen, particularly the green hydrogen, economy in the south west.”

The plant will only use renewable energy to form green hydrogen, which is a clean, zero-emission fuel.

Generated by on-site solar and landfill gases, this development will play an important role in implementing the government’s plans to move polluting and energy-intensive industries away from fossil fuels.

“We’ve got a number of sites and we’ve got fairly ambitious plans over the next two to five years,” Mr Ross added about future infrastructure projects. He said: “We’re looking at upscaling quite significantly.”

Canford Renewable Energy will provide £1.7m into the project via a bank loan and equity funding to this development, along with £3m funding from Dorset Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP)’s Growing Places Fund loan scheme and a £1.5m grant from Low Carbon Dorset.

The UK Hydrogen Strategy published their ambitions to have a world-leading hydrogen economy in August 2021, and believes hydrogen can have the potential to provide a third of the UK’s energy in the future.