One of Britain’s biggest gas companies has unveiled plans for a 60-mile “blue hydrogen” pipeline in the north of England amid a row with environmentalists over the technology.

Cadent Gas, owned by a consortium led by investment bank Macquarie, said the “Hynet” underground pipeline will run from a hydrogen production plant near Ellesmere Port out into Cheshire to nearby factories and power plants.

It will be the first scheme of its kind in the UK and is billed by Cadent as “the first building block in a wider network of hydrogen pipelines across our regions”.

Customers are set to include Heineken, Kraft Heinz, Tata Chemicals, cement maker Heidelberg Materials and glass maker Pilkington.

The company launched a public consultation on the plans just days after Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, pledged £22bn of government funding towards carbon capture projects, including one that is connected to the Hynet scheme.

Under the proposals, factories in North Wales, Merseyside and Cheshire will be connected to a network that will whisk away their carbon dioxide emissions and store them in depleted gas fields under the Irish Sea.

At the same time, these sites will be able to receive hydrogen through a parallel network served, initially, by a plant producing blue hydrogen in Stanlow, near Ellesmere Port.

However, the scheme already faces opposition from some locals as well as campaigners at Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, who are against blue hydrogen production and carbon capture because both involve the continued use of fossil fuels.

Blue hydrogen is made through a process where natural gas is combined with steam, with carbon dioxide created as a byproduct. The CO2 from the Stanlow plant will also be captured and stored.

Mike Childs, head of science and policy at Friends of the Earth, said: “Making it using gas is not a clean process. There are carbon emissions when you extract the gas and you also cannot capture all of the emissions from manufacturing. So we are not in favour.”

Both Macquarie and Cadent, which owns gas distribution networks in the North West, West Midlands, East Midlands, East of England and north London, have bet on hydrogen as a major line of future business.

Macquarie also owns National Gas, the former National Grid subsidiary that is leading “Project Union”, a proposal to build a so-called backbone of hydrogen transmission pipelines across the country to connect major industrial clusters.

It would be done by repurposing some existing gas pipelines as well as building some new ones.

Cadent’s dream of piping the gas into millions of homes was dealt a blow last year when a trial in Whitby, Ellesmere Port, was dropped in the face of fierce public opposition.

While there is resistance to using hydrogen to heat homes, it is seen by many experts as critical to the net zero transition because it could potentially be used to decarbonise heavy industry that cannot easily be electrified.

However, there remains significant debate about how big a role the gas should play and the pros and cons of different processes used to make it.

On Friday, Angela Needle, of Cadent, said: “Hynet will serve as a blueprint for industrial decarbonisation, enabling growth across the manufacturing heartlands of the North West and supporting the Government to achieve its clean power 2030 mission.

“The project was formed to meet the demands of industry who seek to decarbonise as they deliver their products and continue to compete in the global economy.

“We need to support these essential industries in their efforts to ensure it is decarbonisation, not de-industrialisation that happens, and Hynet does this.”