Wiltshire

Wiltshire became the location of a European first in April 2026, 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.

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. Wiltshire hosts significant Ministry of Defence land, including Salisbury Plain, one of the largest military training areas in the UK.

Rivan's Project Steadfast represents a new strand of industrial investment in Wiltshire: deep-tech Energy infrastructure targeting the UK's gas grid transition. SNG produced from renewable electricity and carbon sources can flow through existing gas-grid pipelines, making it a near-term bridging technology for hard-to-decarbonise sectors. A successful 15MW demonstration in Wiltshire would validate the technology for replication at scale across the UK.