A day in the life of the 2035 hydrogen and biomethane system

It's easy to talk about the future of gas in terms of terawatt-hours, allocation rounds and calorific value tolerances. Necessary, but not exactly the stuff of daily life. So instead, let's follow one day, one delivery route, and one hydrogen cluster, to see how it actually feels from the ground. None of the people in this story think about hydrogen or biomethane very much, but that’s the point. By 2035, low-carbon gas isn't a headline, it's just part of how our energy system works and the work to turn this story into reality is already happening now. Somewhere behind every step in this story sits the less visible work of building the data, the market arrangements, and the settlement processes that let hydrogen and biomethane move through a system built for one gas, not several.

05:15 – The farm, Yorkshire Wolds 

Sara is out checking the digesters before the rest of the farm wakes up. Ten years ago, this was a beef and crop farm with a slurry problem. Now the slurry, along with straw and food waste collected from three nearby towns, feeds an anaerobic digestion plant that produces biomethane around the clock. 

The technical detail that used to keep Sara's supplier up at night, and that she's never once had to think about, is that her plant injects "non-propanated" biomethane. Some biomethane plants used to blend in a small amount of propane to bump the gas up to natural gas's calorific value before it could go into the grid. Sara's doesn't. That meant her local gas network needed to be ready for a slightly different gas arriving on its system, measuring and settling it accurately, whichever pipe it came through, alongside every other biomethane plant doing the same nearby. That readiness happened long before Sara's plant was switched on. To her, it's simply a meter reading and a quarterly payment. 

Most of what the plant produces goes straight into the local grid. A smaller share gets diverted before that point, cooled and liquefied at a small unit she added a few years back, and loaded onto tankers instead. That part of the business took longer to turn a profit, but it now sends fuel across the country.

By seven, a truck is backing up to the yard to collect it. 

07:00 – On the road, heading north 

Josh has been driving this route for two years. He loads the last of Sara's liquefied biomethane, bound for a harbourside tank on the Cromarty Firth, checks the manifest, and pulls out onto the A1. 

His cab is hydrogen, not diesel, and the pitch that got him to switch part of his fleet was a simple one: refuel in roughly the same time, similar range, nothing about the drive itself feels different, zero emissions. His fleet still runs plenty of EVs on shorter routes closer to the depot, because for these drives there was never the need to switch to Hydrogen. For him it was not about picking one technology over the other, but about adapting his fleet in the most practical way possible. He was relieved to find that his companies fueling infrastructure could support both hydrogen and EVs. Multiply that logic across a whole country's freight network, and it starts to look less like one driver's fleet decision and more like what a diverse energy system actually runs on. 

Eight hours and one long, uneventful motorway later, he's crossing into the Highlands close to Cromarty. 

Josh's delivery point turns out to be a storage tank by the harbour, close to what locals still call "the cluster." A decade of investment in electrolytic hydrogen production, backed by the offshore wind further out at sea, turned this stretch of coastline into one of the country's hydrogen hubs. 

15:30 – The Firth crossing 

A short walk from the harbour tank, Captain Fiona is running through her pre-departure checks on the small car ferry that crosses the Firth six times a day. It hasn't burned marine diesel in years. 

The same biomethane that flows through Sara's pipe travels here a different way, liquefied at source and delivered as bioLNG enabling the decarbonisation of this crucial transport link. Fiona doesn't think of it as anything out of the ordinary, to her it's simply how the ferry has always run. 

16:00 – Near the Cromarty Firth 

A few miles down the road, Sharon and Alistair are turning on the kettle for their afternoon tea. Alistair works down at the distillery, one of several in the area that switched from oil-fired heat to a hydrogen supply piped in from the cluster years ago, a change that enabled the distillery to source the direct-fired heat needed to get a wash boiling reliably, batch after batch without an eye watering carbon bill. Importantly, the switch to hydrogen didn’t need an expansive buildout as the existing natural gas pipeline network was adapted and repurposed for hydrogen distribution. 

Since the first users in the area switched to hydrogen the cluster significantly expanded over the past decade. A steelworks two valleys over uses hydrogen for the high-temperature reheating its process depends on, in place of the gas it used to burn and a ceramics work on the edge of town fires its ovens the same way. 

16:45 – Just up the coast 

The cluster is also quietly running a data centre a few miles further along the coast. Freya manages operations there, and for her, the cluster was the whole reason the site got built here rather than somewhere else. A decade ago, a facility like this would have leaned on diesel generators for backup power, tested monthly, running for real maybe once a year. Today, with hydrogen already flowing to the distillery and the wider cluster, fuel cells sit in the generators' place, quiet, water vapour drifting from a vent instead of diesel fumes. 

It isn't just backup, either. On the highest-demand afternoons, when the site's power draw would once have strained the local grid, the fuel cells help take the edge off, easing pressure on a connection that, like most in the region, has more data centres queuing for capacity than the grid can currently carry. Hydrogen doesn't solve that queue on its own, but for a site like Freya’s, it buys resilience today, and it only made commercial sense to build here because the cluster's hydrogen supply already existed. 

19:00 – What's actually changed 

By evening, Josh is parked up for the night not far from the harbour, delivery signed off. He has no idea his cargo will be powering a ferry crossing within the hour, and even less reason to know that a mile inland, an entirely separate hydrogen supply is heating a kitchen, a distillery and a data centre, none of it anything to do with the tank he just filled. 

But why would he? Nobody in this story became an energy expert, nobody had to. The connections that matter here aren't personal, they're structural: a delivery route that carries Sara's biomethane four hundred miles to fuel Fiona's ferry, running alongside, but entirely separate from, a cluster of hydrogen infrastructure that happens to let a distillery, a data centre and a steelwork all draw from the same local supply, because someone, a decade earlier, decided it made more sense to build that supply once and let demand grow around it than to solve each use case in isolation. 

NESO's own scenario planning back in the mid-2020s always pointed to a wide range of possible futures for gas demand, rather than one fixed outcome, and 2035 looks less like any single one of those forecasts than like a patchwork of the use cases that worked, stitched together wherever the geography, the feedstock or the infrastructure made it make sense first. True whole system thinking: agriculture and waste in Yorkshire, a hydrogen cluster on the Cromarty coast, and, running between the two, a haulage route. 

Underneath all of it sits something nobody in this story thinks about: data and systems that make sure a farm's non-propanated biomethane, a haulier's hydrogen tank, a distillery's process heat, a family's blended gas supply, a ferry's liquefied biomethane tank and a data centre's fuel cells all get measured, billed and accounted for fairly and accurately, regardless of which pipe, which cluster or which end of the country they happen to be in. That's the work Xoserve’s decarbonisation team is focused on today, well before 2035: How do we account fairly for gases with different characteristics flowing through the same network? How does settlement need to change as more of them enter the system? What information does the industry need to exchange, and how, to keep it all balanced? And what has to change in today's systems and market arrangements to make room for the green gases of tomorrow? Starting to answer all these questions today is what made this ordinary day in 2035 possible. 

Curious about the work already underway to get us there? Explore Xoserve's Managing Different Gases programme and our latest thinking on gas blending.