SSE Hornsea Ltd., Perth, Australia, awarded a contract to Yokogawa United Kingdom Ltd., a subsidiary of Yokogawa Electric Corp., for the upgrade of one of the United Kingdom's largest onshore. underground gas storage facilities, located at Atwick, East Yorkshire.

Based in Chesire, Yokogawa United Kingdom will supply an integrated control and safety system along with a metering solution. The order includes the supply and installation of Yokogawa’s Centum VP integrated production control system to manage the gas compressors. Also included in the project is the ProSafe RS integrated safety instrumented system, which help ensure process safety at the facility.

The Atwick gas storage facility is made up of nine man-made salt cavities that have been leached into a salt layer 1.1 miles (1.8 km) underground, creating approximately 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 When needed, the gas then is withdrawn from the cavities, dried and exported to the National Transmission System.

This contract is part of a project by SSE, one of the United Kingdom’s largest generators of electricity, 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.