Energy company to step on gas over massive storage caverns

E.ON UK secured planning permission for the facility, which will have 10 underground storage caverns, at Whitehill Farm, near Withernwick, to the north of Aldbrough, in 2007.

The caverns, which will be used to store gas at times of low demand and sell it back to the National Grid at peak demand periods, are part of a bid to protect supplies for 20 million UK customers.

E.ON has now told residents in nearby villages that it expects to award a contract to a demolition company shortly to level the farm, a move, it says, which “marks a significant milestone in our preparations for the development of the gas storage facility”.

The construction of the caverns will bring hundreds of workers to the area and will come as a much-needed boost for local businesses, who benefited from the sprawling development of nine caverns south of the village by Southern and Scottish Energy (SSE).

The caverns will be formed out of salt deposits some 1.8km underground by pumping in pressurised seawater and then discharging the brine back into the sea via an offshore outfall.

Work on the offshore part of the scheme is unlikely to take place before 2013-2014 as approval is still needed from the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Marine Management Organisation. It will also need a licence to discharge brine from the Environment Agency.

Fishermen will be excluded from a 4 km square area around the offshore works during the six-month construction phase.

The company acknowledges that fishermen will be affected and that fish and shellfish will be displaced for a “limited and temporary” period of time.

It adds: “A much smaller area affected directly by the works in terms of physical seabed disturbance will take a period of time to recover.”

However, in its environmental statement, E.ON claims that discharging brine – the same method used by SSE – won’t have a lasting effect on the environment.

A spokesman said: “Projects of this scale do take a number of years to move from the drawing board to reality. It is still at the very early stages.

“Just before Christmas last year we updated our planning application that was approved by East Riding Council and we are still working on detailed plans.

“The argument for developing gas storage in the UK doesn’t change – it gives you a flexible resource and that is what Whitehill will help provide in the future.”

The original project by SSE caused controversy, with local people objecting to the industrialisation of what was an open stretch of coastline.

Although salt caverns have been used to store natural gas in Europe and other parts of the world for over 40 years, there are only a few facilities of their kind in the UK. E.ON’s only other plant in the UK, at Holford in Cheshire, is close to completion.

By the end of this decade it is estimated that the UK will be dependent on getting up to 70 per cent of its gas through European pipelines and liquified natural gas which is bought in by sea.

However, the UK’s increasing dependence on other countries, including Russia and other former Soviet Union countries, is considered risky, according to E.ON’s environmental statement, with the UK “particularly vulnerable to supply interruptions from Europe as it lies at the extremity of the pipeline network from the major production areas”.

It added: “Both of these events were experienced by the UK market during the winter of 2005/2006.”

Although the landscape of the Holderness Coast looks unexceptional, its geology is almost unique in the UK, as it clips the western edge of the Upper Permian or Zechstein salt deposits, which stretch from the East Riding and go under the North Sea to Germany and Poland.