North Lincolnshire Council approved a 120 MW green hydrogen production facility at Killingholme Power Station on 20 March 2026, clearing the way for Uniper Hydrogen UK Limited to build one of the largest electrolyser plants yet permitted in Britain. Every kilogram of hydrogen the plant produces is intended for a single customer: Phillips 66’s Humber Refinery, roughly 4 km to the south.
The decision, recorded under planning application PA/2025/1146 with the status “Approve with Conditions,” marks a tangible advance for the Humber industrial cluster, a stretch of North East Lincolnshire coastline that hosts some of the country’s most carbon-intensive operations. Rather than replacing heavy industry, the project aims to decarbonise it from within.
What the planning documents show
The council’s planning register entry describes the proposal as a “low carbon (green) hydrogen production facility” occupying 6.72 hectares within the existing Killingholme Power Station site. The application, filed under the project name Humber H2ub, details modular electrolyser units alongside water treatment, purification, hydrogen storage, and a control building, all fitted inside the power station’s industrial footprint rather than on greenfield land.
Uniper’s covering letter spells out the supply arrangement. The hydrogen will meet the UK Low Carbon Hydrogen Standard and, in the company’s words, “all of it will be exported for use by the Phillips 66 (P66) Humber Refinery.” The letter explains that hydrogen will replace refinery fuel gas in industrial-scale fired heaters, targeting a direct reduction in Scope 1 emissions from the refinery’s core processing operations. That framing positions the project as a decarbonisation tool for an existing heavy industrial asset, not a speculative venture searching for buyers.
Parallel investment at the refinery
The hydrogen approval does not sit in isolation. A separate planning application, PA/2024/1059, covers a low sulphur gasoline plant and a new emission stack at the Humber Refinery itself. Taken together, the two filings suggest Phillips 66 is actively upgrading the complex for both cleaner fuel production and tighter emissions control, a pattern more consistent with extending the refinery’s operational life under stricter environmental rules than with winding it down.
Scale in context
At 120 MW of installed electrolyser capacity, the Killingholme facility would rank among the larger green hydrogen projects currently permitted in the UK. The British government’s Hydrogen Strategy, updated in December 2023, set an ambition of up to 10 GW of low-carbon hydrogen production capacity by 2030. While 120 MW represents a fraction of that national target, a single-site project with a named industrial offtaker and planning consent in hand is a rarity in a sector where many proposals remain at the feasibility or front-end engineering stage.
Uniper, the German-headquartered energy company that was nationalised by the German government in 2022 and has since been restructuring its portfolio, has been developing hydrogen projects across Europe. The Humber H2ub sits alongside the company’s broader ambitions in the region, which have previously included exploration of blue hydrogen options on the same industrial corridor.
What is not yet confirmed
Several important details remain outside the public planning record. The council’s decision notice carries the label “Approve with Conditions,” but the specific conditions, which typically govern construction hours, traffic management, noise limits, and phased delivery, are not visible in the register summaries reviewed for this article. Without them, the timeline from consent to first hydrogen delivery is unknown.
No public statement from Phillips 66 in the documents reviewed confirms the offtake arrangement, expected emission reductions, or the volume of fuel gas that hydrogen would displace. The supply relationship is described solely in Uniper’s covering letter, filed as part of the planning justification. Whether a binding long-term contract exists, or whether commercial terms are still under negotiation, is not addressed in the filings.
Financial details are also absent. The application documents disclose no capital costs, financing structures, or operating expenditure estimates. No reference in the planning record links the project to the UK’s Hydrogen Allocation Round or any specific subsidy mechanism. Whether Uniper has secured a contract for difference, public grant funding, or purely private financing for the build-out remains an open question.
An environmental impact assessment is referenced at the scoping stage in Uniper’s covering letter, but a full EIA report has not surfaced in the publicly accessible summaries consulted here. Detailed environmental submissions are often lodged as separate technical appendices that can be harder to locate in council portals, so their absence online does not necessarily mean they were not filed.
What to watch next
The public record firmly establishes that North Lincolnshire Council has approved a 120 MW green hydrogen facility at Killingholme, promoted by Uniper and designed to supply the nearby Humber Refinery. It also shows parallel capital investment in cleaner fuel and emissions infrastructure at the refinery complex.
The signals that will determine whether this project moves from planning consent to physical reality are now largely commercial and political: confirmation of a binding offtake agreement with Phillips 66, disclosure of financing or subsidy support, publication of the detailed planning conditions, and evidence of early site preparation at Killingholme. For the Humber region’s workforce and communities, those next steps will reveal whether one of Britain’s most carbon-heavy industrial corridors can retrofit itself for a lower-emission future without losing the jobs and economic activity that refining still supports.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
