East Knapton is a village in the

civil parish In England, a civil parish is a type of administrative parish used for local government. It is a territorial designation which is the lowest tier of local government. Civil parishes can trace their origin to the ancient system of parishes, w ...

Scampston Scampston is a village and civil parish in North Yorkshire, England. It lies close to the A64 road, approximately east of Malton. The parish includes the hamlets of East Knapton and West Knapton. In 2011 the parish had a population of 313. ...

, in

North Yorkshire North Yorkshire is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in Northern England.The Unitary authorities of England, unitary authority areas of City of York, York and North Yorkshire (district), North Yorkshire are in Yorkshire and t ...

, England.

Geography

It is just north of the A64 near the junction with the B1258. The York to Scarborough railway line is just north of the village and runs close to the power station. From 1845 until 1930, there was a

railway station Rail transport (also known as train transport) is a means of transport using wheeled vehicles running in railway track, tracks, which usually consist of two parallel steel railway track, rails. Rail transport is one of the two primary means of ...

. The village is in the

Rillington Rillington is a village and civil parish in North Yorkshire, England. Rillington was mentioned in the Domesday Survey in 1086 and rural life was relatively unchanged until the coming of the railway in 1845. The village has two pubs the Coach ...

ward which has a combined population of 1,734. On the other side of the A64 is Knapton Wood.

History

From 1866 to 1935 it was in

Knapton Knapton is a village and civil parish in the English county of Norfolk. Knapton is located south-east of Cromer and north-east of Norwich, along the B1145. History Knapton's name is of Anglo-Saxon origin and derives from the Old English for ...

parish when it became part of Scampston. Until 1974 the village lay in the historic county boundaries of the

East Riding of Yorkshire The East Riding of Yorkshire, often abbreviated to the East Riding or East Yorkshire, is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in the Yorkshire and the Humber region of England. It borders North Yorkshire to the north and west, S ...

. From 1974 to 2023 it was part of the district of

Ryedale Ryedale was a non-metropolitan district in North Yorkshire, England. It was in the Vale of Pickering, a low-lying flat area of land drained by the River Derwent, Yorkshire, River Derwent. The Vale's landscape is rural with scattered villages ...

, it is now administered by the unitary

North Yorkshire Council North Yorkshire Council, known between 1974 and 2023 as North Yorkshire County Council, is the local authority for the non-metropolitan county of North Yorkshire, England. Since 2023 the council has been a unitary authority, being a county coun ...

Knapton Generating Station

Transformer and electricity power generating gear at Knapton Power Station - geograph

This power station was opened in 1995 by Amy Glover, 8 years old. It has a 42 MWe

General Electric LM6000 The General Electric LM6000 is a turboshaft aeroderivative gas turbine engine. The LM6000 is derived from the CF6-80C2 aircraft turbofan. It has additions and modifications designed to make it more suitable for marine propulsion, industrial powe ...

open cycle

gas turbine A gas turbine or gas turbine engine is a type of Internal combustion engine#Continuous combustion, continuous flow internal combustion engine. The main parts common to all gas turbine engines form the power-producing part (known as the gas gene ...

with a thermal efficiency of 38%. The development was the subject of a public inquiry in 1992, formal consent was given by the Department of Trade and Industry and the Department of the Environment in March 1993.Knapton Generating Station, Scottish Power publicity brochure, undated c.2000. In August 2006,

Scottish Power Scottish Power Limited, trading as ScottishPower, is a vertically integrated energy company based in Glasgow, Scotland. It is a subsidiary of Spanish utility firm Iberdrola. ScottishPower is the distribution network operator for Central an ...

sold the power station to the RGS Energy Ltd, a subsidiary of UK Energy Systems Ltd (a holding company owned by

US Energy Systems US or Us most often refers to: * ''Us'' (pronoun), the objective case of the English first-person plural pronoun ''we'' * US, an abbreviation for the United States US, U.S., Us, us, or u.s. may also refer to: Arts and entertainment Albums * ...

Avon, Connecticut Avon ( ) is a town in the Farmington Valley region of the Capitol Planning Region, Connecticut, United States. As of 2020, the town had a population of 19,795. History At the end of the last Ice Age, 12,400 years BP of the Younger Dryas, nom ...

) for £15.5 million. The plant uses about 12,000

BTU The British thermal unit (Btu) is a measure of heat, which is a form of energy. It was originally defined as the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. It is also part of the United Stat ...

per

kWh A kilowatt-hour (unit symbol: kW⋅h or kW h; commonly written as kWh) is a non-SI unit of energy equal to 3.6 megajoules (MJ) in SI units, which is the energy delivered by one kilowatt of power for one hour. Kilowatt-hours are a common b ...

of electricity, which is inefficient to more modern CCGT plants which use about 6,500 BTU per kWh of electricity.

Natural gas Natural gas (also fossil gas, methane gas, and gas) is a naturally occurring compound of gaseous hydrocarbons, primarily methane (95%), small amounts of higher alkanes, and traces of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, hydrogen sulfide and helium ...

was discovered in Ryedale in 1970. The gas for the power station does not come from the

National Transmission System The United Kingdom's National Transmission System (NTS) is the network of gas pipelines that supply gas to about forty power stations and large industrial users from natural gas terminals situated on the coast, and to gas distribution companies ...

but local gas fields found in

Permian The Permian ( ) is a geologic period and System (stratigraphy), stratigraphic system which spans 47 million years, from the end of the Carboniferous Period million years ago (Mya), to the beginning of the Triassic Period 251.902 Mya. It is the s ...

limestone and carboniferous sandstone at 5,000-foot depth. The Permian reservoir gas contains small quantities of hydrogen sulphide (less than 0.1% by weight). At the Knapton site the combined gas flow from the well sites passes to a separator where liquids are removed. It then passes to a sulphur removal facility before being sent to the gas turbine. The removed liquids are sent to a liquids injection well which returns them to the underground reservoir. The Knapton site also has a ground flare to burn waste gases. In 2014 Third Energy announced a joint venture with Moorland Energy Limited (MEL) to develop the Ebberston Moor South development. Gas from the existing Ebberston Moor South well will be transported via a new 14-km pipeline to the Knapton Generating Station. Knapton Generating Station was taken offline in 2019 and was subsequently dismantled. There are plans to install a 56 MWh battery on the site.

Ryedale gas fields

See main article Ryedale gas fields The Ryedale gas fields, also known as the Vale of Pickering gas fields, comprise four onshore gas producing fields in

, United Kingdom. The fields were discovered between 1970 and 1991. From 1995 to 2019 the gas was used as fuel for the gas-turbine driven Knapton power station. Production of gas from the fields was suspended in 2020.

References

External links

US Energy Systems
{{authority control Villages in North Yorkshire Natural gas-fired power stations in England Natural gas fields in the United Kingdom