EnergyPathways

The hard work begins.

Good Morning Team.

In February 2025, I started talking about EPP as being central to the UK’s energy storage storm.

I will be honest.

That first piece was not a particularly well-read article.

Very few people had any interest in EPP, and the feedback I received was all centered on the same concern - that while some elements of the investment case did not require government permissions, ultimately, this company needed someone with the power of the pen at the NSTA to grant the business a gas storage licence.

This became inevitable when the S35 was authorised (ultimately by a certain Ed Miliband).

And with the GSL now issued, it’s only a matter of time until this stock hits national headlines. Happily, an EPP article now attracts thousands and thousands of readers.

Yes, it’s validating to see a long-term thesis come together.

I think now that the binary risk is over, it’s worth considering the two distint, but related, ways of perceiving the investment case.

The first is the fundamentals underpinning what is to be built.

The second is perhaps more interesting - the WHY it needs to be built.

Why did this company enjoy ‘project of national significance’ rubber-stamping from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero?

Let’s consider.

Part 1: What’s Being Built

I don’t want to go into too much detail here, as I have gone into depth several times already (check the archive).

But for a new investor, here’s the bottom line:

EPP has been awarded a Gas Storage Licence by the NSTA for its flagship MESH project in the East Irish Sea.

The licence spans an area capable of supporting up to 60 large-scale salt caverns with the potential for multi-terawatt-hour scale energy storage, and is expected to be Britain’s largest integrated energy storage facility.

The UK Government had already designated MESH a project of ‘national significance.’

Within the project, there are two segments. That which didn’t need a gas storage licence, and that which does.

Fundamentally, this works best as a unified, synergistic whole (and with the licence awarded, the segmentation no longer matters).

But it’s still easiest if you understand them separately.

What doesn’t need the gas storage licence

Compressed Air Energy Storage.

FEED (Front End Engineering Design) for the MESH Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) project launched a fortnight ago, funded by the recently announced £15 million financing agreement.

Pre-FEED studies with Siemens Energy have already confirmed its economic viability.

The numbers are significant.

A 300MW/55GWh facility with more than seven days of sustained discharge, expected to be the world’s largest CAES facility and Britain’s largest Long Duration Energy Storage project.

Estimated annual revenues from CAES operations alone are around >£150 million, with further upside from cavern expansion and government cap & floor benefits.

The East Irish Sea is flanked by the Mona and Morgan offshore wind farms coming online — curtailed power that MESH is perfectly positioned to absorb and store.

EnergyPathways holds the IP for its CAES technology, making expansion with Siemens Energy likely as wind capacity grows.

As a reminder, dispatchable power can be produced at roughly half the cost of gas-fired generation, and with a project lifespan of 25+ years, LDES alone is a company-maker at this scale.

What the new gas storage licence unlocks

The risk that the storage licence wouldn’t be granted was the central bear case for EPP.

That risk is now gone.

Here is what it opens up:

Gas storage — >£400m per year. Marram alone matches Centrica’s Rough facility (50–60 BCF). Revenue includes volatility trading — cheap summer gas filled and sold at winter peaks. That figure is conservative given the UK’s minimal storage base, and it excludes the Knox and Lowry fields that will come online in time.

Gas production — ~£500m. Marram field alone holds 46 BCF at current spot pricing. Slightly reduced by cushion gas requirements, but the nitrogen in the mix feeds directly into ammonia production.

Ammonia — £55–100m per year. Projected output of 110,000 tonnes per year. The last UK domestic ammonia producer closed in 2023, and a border import levy arrives in 2027. The timing could not be better for a domestic supplier.

Graphite — >£500m per year. Around 60,000 tonnes per year of high-grade synthetic graphite, refined with Mitsui of Japan to nuclear and military-grade specifications — a classification that has a very positive effect on the price. EPP would be the UK’s only domestic producer.

‘The current Middle East crisis serves as a stark reminder of Britain’s limited energy storage capacity that leaves it vulnerable to global supply shocks and the resulting impact of higher energy bills.’

— CEO Ben Clube, 6 May 2026

Ben’s right. More on this in a moment.

The investment case in simple terms

At a market cap of now roughly £20 million, MESH is still priced as a retail-focused development story.

When project-level financing hits and institutions run the numbers on projected yields of 25%+ per annum over a 25-year lifespan, pension funds, family offices and institutions replace the current register.

They invest for sustained compounding, with real money.

The current £15 million financing was likely a prerequisite to getting the licence award, and while its terms means EPP has to deliver on time - bigger guns will come in to replace this capital as the project progresses.

The revenue diversification is unusual — gas, power, hydrogen, ammonia and graphite span different industries and different commodity cycles. And EPP is effectively apolitical: homegrown North Sea gas appeals to Reform; domestic graphite for defence and ammonia for farmers works for everyone else.

The project is commercially viable under any government.

Tier One partners — Siemens Energy, Wood and Costain — lend the kind of institutional credibility that opens doors in government and project finance. Little or no government subsidy is required; MESH self-finances on commercial terms.

The Roadmap

→ FEED launched and GSL awarded now

→ Final Investment Decision 2028

→ CAES and gas storage operational by late 2031.

MESH is also intended as a template.

EnergyPathways and Siemens Energy are positioning it as the flagship of many projects targeting favourable geology across the North Sea Continental Shelf.

If the model works here, it rolls out.

The central risk — would the storage licence be granted? — has been resolved. What remains is execution: FEED, planning consents, grid connection and FID in 2028. The revenue streams are diverse, the partners are credible and the UK’s structural undersupply of gas storage creates serious pricing power.

The question now is how long it takes for the valuation to reflect a project of national significance.

That’s what you’re investing in.

Part 2: Why this needs to be built

This si the interesting bit.

The UK is currently suffering from an energy emergency.

The lowest storage in Europe, the highest prices (perhaps in the world), and significant dependency on one energy source. Which, together, I’m sure you’ll agree, is not ideal.

But let’s start with a number that should be on the front page of every newspaper in the country.

In 2025, Britain spent £1.46 billion paying wind farms to switch off and gas plants to switch back on.

Not because the wind wasn’t blowing.

Because the grid couldn’t handle it.

About £380 million went directly to wind farm owners to reduce their output, while over £1 billion went to gas-fired power stations to replace the energy that was thrown away.

The energy was there.

Clean, cheap, domestic.

Tick, tick, tick.

And we binned it.

Without urgent reform, those costs are forecast to reach £8 billion a year by 2030.

That is being added to your energy bill. Every year. It’s a key reason why your energy bill has basically doubled since the pandemic began.

This is the problem MESH was built to solve.

Britain is a continental outlier — and not in a good way

Almost every other major European nation treats gas storage as critical national infrastructure. Britain doesn’t, because for some reason our politicians, regardless of tie colour, just can’t seem to get the risks into their heads - even after the Ukraine war and Hormuz, two events risk analysts promised forever would never happen.

The UK holds just 12 days of gas on average — 7.5 days at peak winter demand.

Our immediate neighbours?

• Germany holds 89 days.

• France holds 103 days.

• The Netherlands holds 123 days.

The Netherlands stores enough gas to last four months. The UK stores enough to last a week and a half.

In January 2025, during a colder-than-usual winter combined with the end of Russian gas flows through Ukraine, UK storage sites were 26% lower than the previous year at the same point — leaving Britain with less than a week of gas demand in store.

Centrica’s CEO Chris O’Shea put it plainly at the time:

‘The UK’s gas storage levels are concerningly low. We are an outlier from the rest of Europe when it comes to the role of storage in our energy system and we are now seeing the implications of that.’

The government’s standard response is that Britain has diverse supply sources — Norway, LNG terminals and interconnectors.

That argument is wearing thin on me because I can see my new energy bill, and it gets higher every year. It’s also a disaster for the economy in general - expensive energy is cancerous to economic growth.

And when a global supply shock hits, LNG cargoes don’t come to Britain out of loyalty. They go to whoever is paying the most.

As Clube noted in a recent podcast with me:

‘Running a just-in-time gas supply system means the UK is exposed to high gas prices when there are global supply shocks like we’re experiencing right now. Gas storage is a buffer to protect against high prices — and having it will lower gas prices.’

And because gas sets the marginal price of electricity across the entire grid, lower gas prices directly reduce electricity prices for every household in Britain, whether they use gas or not.

The wasted wind scandal

Britain’s renewable buildout is accelerating fast. What isn’t keeping pace is the infrastructure needed to actually use what’s generated.

In 2025, over 12 terawatt hours of renewable power was curtailed — a 22% increase on 2024.

Almost all of it came from Scotland, where the wind blows hardest and most consistently. I know this because I read it, but also because I spent a lot of my childhood there.

The grid simply cannot move the power south quickly enough, so operators pay the wind farms to stop, then pay gas plants to start up instead. Seagreen, Scotland’s largest offshore wind farm, spent much of 2024 curtailed 71% of the time.

This is a structural failure, and it’s getting worse every year as wind capacity grows faster than transmission infrastructure.

The worst-case projection if nothing changes: £16 billion in consumer costs by 2030.

MESH sits in an optimal location to address exactly this.

Its CAES facility is positioned between the B6 and B7a grid constraint boundaries — exactly where curtailed Scottish wind power gets stuck.

Instead of paying wind farms to switch off, that surplus energy compresses air into offshore salt caverns and releases it as dispatchable power when the grid needs it.

This means producing power at roughly half the cost of gas-fired generation. Storage built at scale in the right place doesn’t just solve the curtailment problem; it also resets the economics of British electricity.

And it’ll make EPP a ton of cash.

But the electricity storage gap is just as critical

Britain has set a target of 16 gigawatts of long duration energy storage capacity.

The MESH CAES facility, at 300 MW with 55 GWh of storage, is expected to be the UK’s largest LDES project when built — and it barely makes a dent in what’s needed.

As Clube notes:

‘We’re the largest, and we’re barely scratching the surface.’

Current battery projects being submitted to the government’s cap and floor process offer hours of storage. MESH offers seven days.

That matters when you’re trying to manage a grid running on intermittent renewables through a cold, still January week with no wind and falling nuclear output. Batteries won’t solve that. Only large-scale, long-duration storage will.

The unit economics make the case clearly.

MESH CAES stores energy at an estimated £20,000 per megawatt hour. Pumped hydro costs around £75,000. Battery systems cost around £400,000. There is no other technology that can deliver long-duration storage at this scale for anything close to this price.

Doubling Britain’s buffer

MESH’s gas storage component, now with its licence granted by the NSTA, would double Britain’s total gas storage capacity.

The Marram field alone holds 50–60 BCF — equivalent in scale to Centrica’s Rough facility, which currently accounts for nearly half of all UK gas storage. Rough itself has faced potential closure for years due to the absence of a viable commercial model.

If Rough had been running at full capacity in recent years, Centrica estimates it would have saved UK households £100 from both their gas and electricity bills each winter. MESH would add equivalent capacity — and do so at what EnergyPathways believes is a lower development cost than competing proposals.

Importantly, the gas storage revenue model is not just about capacity, but seasonal trading — filling caverns with cheap summer gas and selling it at winter peak prices.

Annual revenues from the Marram field alone are estimated at £400 million or more, before Knox and Lowry are included, because you are doing what all good investors do - buying low and selling high.

What makes this different

Most large energy infrastructure projects need substantial government subsidy to get off the ground.

MESH doesn’t.

The CAES project’s low unit cost means the government’s cap and floor mechanism — designed to reduce the cost of debt, not to fund the project outright — is sufficient to make it commercially viable without net subsidy to the taxpayer or consumer.

The revenue streams are also diverse.

CAES and long duration electricity storage. Gas storage and seasonal trading. Gas production from the Marram, Knox and Lowry fields. Hydrogen and ammonia production — at a moment when the last UK domestic ammonia producer has closed and a border import levy arrives in 2027. High-grade synthetic graphite production with Mitsui of Japan, at nuclear and military-grade specifications, making EnergyPathways the UK’s only domestic producer.

Each of those streams serves a different market, a different commodity cycle and a different policy priority.

The project is difficult to oppose across the political spectrum: homegrown North Sea gas, domestic graphite for defence, ammonia for British agriculture, and cheap dispatchable power for everyone’s electricity bill.

Tier One partners — Siemens Energy, Wood and Costain — do not get involved in projects that don’t stack up. The modular design, built with Siemens, means MESH is also a template. The East Irish Sea salt sequence has capacity for 60 caverns.

MESH currently plans four.

Until this week, the central bear case for EnergyPathways was straightforward: what if the gas storage licence isn’t granted?

Despite writing personally to Ed, and the very obvious reasons it should be, you can never be 100% certain until the Fat Lady sings.

And she’s singing.

The NSTA has awarded the GSL.

The CAES FEED is already funded and underway.

The project has national significance designation from the Secretary of State.

Global banks have expressed interest in project financing.

FID is targeted for 2028, with operations by late 2031.

But the market is still pricing this as a speculative development story. That gap between perception and reality will close quickly once project-level institutional financing arrives and the project stops being retail news and starts being pension fund news.

Britain cannot achieve Clean Power 2030, meaningful energy security, or lower consumer bills without large-scale, long-duration energy storage and substantially more gas storage capacity.

MESH delivers both.

Now Ben.

Build the damn thing.

Sources - I rarely include these, but in case you want to check the numbers:

• Centrica, January 2025 — “Perfect storm reduces UK winter gas storage to concerningly low levels”

• Tim Harper, December 2025 — “Wind Curtailment Costs Hit £1.5bn: Why & How to Fix It”

• Business Energy Deals, December 2025 — “Wind curtailment in Britain: The rising cost of wasted wind”

• Engineering and Technology Magazine, January 2026 — “Record wasted wind power in 2025 could have powered every home in London”

• Euronews, January 2026 — “Wind is now one of the world’s biggest electricity sources — so why are we switching turbines off?”

• Renewable Energy Foundation — “Discarded wind energy increases by 91% in 2024”

• Carbon Tracker Initiative, June 2023 — “Britain wastes enough wind generation to power 1 million homes”

• Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, October 2025 — NG201: “UK Gas: Demand Volatility”

• Energy UK, November 2025 — “The role of gas storage in ensuring energy security”

• Hansard, UK Parliament, January 2025 — Gas Storage Levels debate

• EU Council — “How much gas have EU countries stored?”