A major South Cumbrian employer is building a green hydrogen hub at its site in Barrow as a test bed to decarbonise its operation across the world.

Kimberly-Clark, which employs around 350 people at its factory in Barrow, signed an agreement with Carlton Power, based in Stokesley, near Middlesbrough, in 2022 to develop a green hydrogen scheme on land opposite its site on the A590.

Green hydrogen is defined as hydrogen which is produced by using electrolysers to take water and separate it into hydrogen and oxygen using renewable electricity.

It is hoped to be in operation by early 2026, with the project successfully passing Round One of the government’s Hydrogen Allocation Round in December.

This means the project has been awarded a financial contract from the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero.

The £40m scheme would be the first of its kind in the county and part of Kimberly-Clark’s wider mission to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels at sites across the world.

The site will import renewable electricity from the grid to power an electrolysis plant and produce hydrogen.

The project will initially use a 30MW electrolyser, expected to produce approximately 3000 tonnes of hydrogen every year.

Most of this will be used by Kimberly-Clark in Barrow, its largest UK site, which makes products including Andrex and Kleenex and accounts for approximately 60 per cent of the company’s total energy consumption in the UK.

Oriol Margo, Kimberly-Clark’s EMEA sustainability and transformation leader, says the company has set itself a set of global targets, with a number of local and regional projects playing their part.

The Barrow project is part of a wider initiative to decarbonise its whole UK operation, including its Northfleet Mill, in Gravesend, and its site in Flint, North Wales.

It has already decarbonised 80 per cent of its electricity supply in the UK through a Power Purchase Agreement with Octopus Renewables Infrastructure Trust to construct a new onshore wind farm in South Lanarkshire.

The Barrow project will replace the natural gas used by its boilers at the site with hydrogen, representing 30 per cent of its natural gas consumption

"We have been exploring many different technologies, decarbonisation will not necessarily be one single technology, but this will reduce Barrow's dependence on natural gas significantly,” says Oriol.

"As a global multinational, we believe that it doesn't matter where these efforts take place, as long as they are effective in reducing emissions, so we will go wherever it's easier where we can make progress.”

"We have significant challenges in some areas like the Middle East and Africa, for instance, we have challenging regulations that prevent us from making renewable energy power purchase agreements.

“The UK and Europe are very well placed to make progress. We have the ambition, our employees and consumers want it, the government support it and they are helping to facilitate it.”

Although the factory has the capacity to consume much more hydrogen, he says ensuring this is green hydrogen is a challenge because there is no guarantee of supplying renewable electricity to make it.

Oriol says Kimberly-Clark is providing an “anchor contract” to ensure there is a customer for the hydrogen the site produces, although there is the possibility that other businesses in the area may use it in time.

"Green hydrogen is extremely difficult to get off the ground unless you have an anchor contract and we are making this possible, we're taking the full capacity for this phase one,” he says

"I don't think that decarbonisation and Net Zero is necessarily a technical challenge, I think it's more of a commercial challenge.

"I think the technologies we need are there, it's more about how we can make them work.

“In the UK we want to push the limits so that we can learn and then replicate it in other places globally. This project takes us massively forward in that challenge.”