Wiltshire
South-west English county; site of Rivan's Project Steadfast, Europe's largest SNG plant.
Wiltshire, the rural south-west English county that hosts Salisbury Plain's military training ranges, became the site of Europe's largest synthetic natural gas plant when Rivan raised £25m for Project Steadfast on 20 April 2026.
Last refreshed: 31 July 2026
Why is Wiltshire the site of Europe's biggest synthetic natural gas plant?
Timeline for Wiltshire
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UK Startups and InnovationBackground
Wiltshire is a ceremonial county in south-west England, bordering Somerset, Dorset, Hampshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. It is predominantly rural, with its largest settlement at Swindon in the north and a landscape dominated by chalk downland and agricultural land. The county is administered by Wiltshire Council, a unitary authority created in 2009 that merged the former county and district councils, and it hosts significant Ministry of Defence land, including Salisbury Plain, one of the largest military training areas in the UK.
In April 2026 the county became the location of a new strand of industrial investment when clean-energy startup Rivan raised £25m to build Project Steadfast, a 15MW synthetic natural gas (SNG) plant that will be the largest SNG facility in Europe and the first to inject SNG into the UK gas grid . The round was led by IQ Capital, with Plural and angel investors including Matt Clifford and Thomas Wolf participating .
SNG produced from renewable electricity and carbon sources is molecularly identical to fossil gas, so industries using existing gas-fired equipment can switch without replacing hardware, making Wiltshire's demonstration plant a test case for whether the technology can be replicated at scale across the UK gas grid.