Hill Top and Hole House are two of very few gas storage sites in the UK, representing high strategic importance for the nation’s flexible daily gas storage deliverability. Hill Top has a maximum gas deliverability equivalent to 11% of the UK’s total, which will increase to 15% when Hole House is returned to service.
The facilities are located approximately 2 kilometres to the north of Crewe in Cheshire, United Kingdom, an area with rich salt reserves and a history of extraction dating back to the Roman period. Both Hole House and Hill Top are working farms with cattle, sheep and crops. Interconnecting pipes and cables are buried along clearly marked routes, below the depth at which normal farming activities occur.
Hole House and Hill Top are both operated from a common control room, sympathetically designed to blend in with traditional farm buildings. Connection into the gas National Transmission System (NTS) is through a pipeline, with two separate connection points, the Elworth-Mickle Trafford feeder and the Wheelock feeder.
4 million therms / day
Hill Top daily deliverability
15%
Total share of flexible UK gas storage capacity following Hole House recommission
1.6 million therms / day
Hole House daily deliverability
2067 / 2096
Lease expiry
11%
Total share of flexible UK gas storage capacity
Hill Top
Status: In operation
Hill Top was developed by British Salt Ltd for the purpose of brine extraction over a total of ten caverns. Subsequently, the site was developed for gas storage, with a design life of 30 years. The first three caverns have been operational since 2014 and a further two caverns were added in 2018.
Since taking ownership in 2024, Kistos has undertaken several pressure relaxation trials to increase the working gas capacity at Hill Top and significantly increase the revenue potential of the site from both intrinsic seasonal trades and extrinsic trading.
Hill Top now has a daily deliverability close to 4 million therms or 69,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day.
Hole House
Status: Under recommissioning
Hole House was developed specifically for gas storage in 1997 and was operational from 2001 through to 2018 when a period of re-brining the caverns was commenced. Three out of the total four caverns are now brine filled, with cushion gas sold to market, and the remaining cavern will also be re-brined over the short-term.
In 2025, Kistos announced the sanction of the Hole House Return to Service Project. All four caverns at Hole House will be brought back into operation. At completion, during 2028, the combined sites with have a working gas capacity of 5.6 million therms, or 96,500 barrels of oil equivalent, per day.
Alternative uses
Both gas storage sites have the potential to be repurposed for future energy storage uses, including the storage of compressed air or hydrogen.
Compressed Air Energy Storage has demonstrated its potential for clean storage, high lifetime scalability, low self-discharge, long discharge times, relatively low capital costs, and high durability. Possible government support could potentially help reduce the cost of meeting the UK’s net zero targets by storing excess low-carbon variable renewable electricity for longer periods of time, helping to manage the variation in renewable energy generation.
In 2021, a Geostock study concluded that the site’s caverns could meet the requirements to store hydrogen with a lower subsurface cost than alternative options and no requirement for new drilling. Any possible hydrogen storage development would support the new HyNet cluster , a new net-zero industrial cluster situated approximately 25 kilometres from the site.
