Centrica’s Rough gas warehouse in the North Sea to be decommissioned

The owner of British Gas is pressing ahead with plans to decommission a huge gas storage facility as part of a multi-billion pound overhaul of the UK’s energy infrastructure.

A segment of Centrica’s Rough platform, which stores natural gas under the North Sea 18 miles off the Yorkshire coast, will begin to be decommissioned almost four decades after it opened in 1985.

The Rough gas field, on which the facility sits, was initially discovered in the late 1960s and taken over by British Gas for storage in 1980.

It was initially scheduled to close in 2017, but was partially reopened in autumn 2022, when a rise in global energy prices raised fears that the UK could run out of fuel to power its electricity grid.

Rough’s ‘Alpha’ site, one of two that make up the facility, has been closed since 2019 and will now be decommissioned as part of a review of the project.

It comes as Centrica, the parent company of British Gas, pushes ahead with plans for a £2bn investment in the site where a new platform will be built in the North Sea.

Centrica boss Chris O’Shea previously said the investment plan aims to “create the world’s largest gas storage facility”.

This would imply a capacity of around 200 billion cubic feet of gas, along with up to 5,000 jobs. It has also said that in the future the site could be used to store hydrogen, which is considered a more environmentally friendly energy source than natural gas.

A Centrica spokesperson said: “The existing Rough platform is now almost 40 years old and, as part of our regulatory requirements, we must begin the decommissioning process.”

They added: ‘Our plans for Rough remain unchanged. Subject to securing a cap-and-floor model for the redeveloped asset, we still plan to invest up to £2bn to convert Rough into the world’s largest hydrogen storage facility.

“This investment, if unlocked with the new regulatory model, would allow us to build a new platform to meet our ambitions.”