On 20 August 1965 the drilling rig Sea Gem, working in the North Sea east of the Humber, struck gas in what would become the West Sole field. It was the first British discovery of offshore gas. Four months later, on 27 December 1965, the Sea Gem capsized while being moved, killing thirteen of the crew. The discovery survived the disaster. By March 1967 the first North Sea gas was being piped ashore at a new terminal at Easington. Within a few years the long industrial transformation of British energy was underway - from town gas made from coal to natural gas from beneath the sea - and Easington was the gateway.

What the road signs call simply the Easington Gas Terminal is actually four plants on adjacent ground, each run by a different company. Perenco operates two of them, one at Easington and the larger processing facility at Dimlington just south. Centrica Storage Ltd runs the Rough Terminal, handling gas going into and out of the giant Rough storage field offshore. Gassco, owned by the Kingdom of Norway, runs the Langeled Receiving Facility. Together the four plants can move more than a billion cubic feet of gas a day. Gas leaves Easington through Feeder 1, a twenty-four-inch pipeline, and runs ninety miles across country to Totley near Sheffield, where it joins the National Transmission System.

The Langeled pipeline opened in October 2006. For five years until the Nord Stream pipeline was completed it was the longest subsea pipeline on Earth. Its northern end is at the Sleipner gas field, with later connections to Ormen Lange. Its southern end is here at Easington. Gas pressure in Norway pushes the methane across more than a thousand kilometres of sea bed at depths of up to a kilometre. When it arrives in East Yorkshire it can deliver up to 2.5 billion cubic feet per day, equivalent to about a fifth of UK demand. In the months after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and pulled gas off the European market, this single pipeline ending in a Holderness field became one of the most strategically important pieces of infrastructure in northern Europe.

Many of the gas fields feeding Easington are named after villages the sea has taken from this coast. Ravenspurn, Cleeton, Dimlington, Hoton, Hyde, Newsham - these were all once Holderness settlements, lost to coastal erosion over the centuries. Others are named for Roman gods - Juno, Mercury, Neptune, Minerva, Apollo - and a few for inventors and chemists. Babbage is named for Charles Babbage. Whittle is named for the jet pioneer Frank Whittle. Wollaston is named for the chemist William Hyde Wollaston. The names sit oddly together on the offshore map: drowned medieval hamlets sharing platform space with the engineers and gods who could not have imagined them.

The Easington plants are designated critical national infrastructure. They are guarded by Civil Nuclear Constabulary officers - armed police originally raised to protect nuclear sites - and supported by resources from the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure. All four plants are major fire hazards, so they hold reservoirs of one to three million litres of water for firefighting. In March 2008 contractors digging in a field nearby uncovered an unexploded World War Two bomb, evidence that the strategic importance of this stretch of coast was understood by the Luftwaffe eighty years before it was understood by anyone reading their winter gas bill. The pipes hum. The flares burn low. And the lights of Britain stay on, one cubic foot at a time.