Onshore gas storage facilities contract

Yokogawa has been awarded a multi-million pound contract by SSE Hornsea Ltd for the upgrade of one of Britain's largest onshore underground gas storage facilities, located at Atwick, East Yorkshire.

Yokogawa United Kingdom will supply an integrated control and safety system, together with a metering solution. The order includes the supply and installation of Yokogawa’s flagship CENTUM® VP integrated production control system to control the gas compressors. Also included in the project is the ProSafe® RS integrated safety instrumented system, which will contribute to ensuring process safety at the facility.

The Atwick gas storage facility comprises nine man-made salt cavities that have been leached into a salt layer 1.8 kilometers underground, creating around 325 million cubic meters of gas storage space. Gas is imported to the site and injected into the cavities for storage. When needed, the gas is then withdrawn from the cavities, dried, and exported to the National Transmission System. According to the British Geological Survey: “When compared to above ground storage tank facilities, underground gas storage provides the significantly greater and cheaper storage volumes required and, when carefully constructed and monitored, added levels of safety.”

This contract is part of an SSE project to extend the life of the site and allow its use for both peak shaving and longer term storage by improving control, compression, and metering. It is the project’s aim to ensure the viability of the asset’s control systems and the commercial availability of the facility for the future by replacing the obsolete control systems with modern, maintainable, and supportable control and safety systems.

“This is a significant order win for Yokogawa,” says David Clough, Sales Director at Yokogawa United Kingdom. “It was the quality of our products and their technical superiority, together with the experience and dedication of our engineers that were recognized by the customer. We are committed to achieve the project’s aim, enhancement of the operational life, while maintaining safety.”

Herman van den Berg, President, Yokogawa Europe B.V: “In Europe and North America, gas is often stored in underground facilities, and many projects for the construction and upgrade of such facilities are in the planning stage, spurred by such developments as the surge in shale gas production. Yokogawa is targeting the natural gas industry, and we believe that this project will allow us to gain further expertise in gas storage control and safety applications that we intend to share with the entire Group.”