BIP partners with Imperial College London on key energy transition projects
Imperial College London has announced a new collaboration with BIP’s UK member firm. The partnership sees the professional services firm support next-generation sustainability solutions across two key parts of the university’s energy transition research.
Headquartered in Italy, BIP is one of Europe’s larger management consultancy firms with approximately 6,000 professionals. Part of a global consulting group operating across 14 countries with more than 6,500 professionals, BIP’s UK wing is based in the City of London.
The firm is regularly cited as being one of the UK’s leading consulting firms by a number of sources, including the Financial Times. And earlier in 2026, BIP was selected for Consultancy.UK’s Top Consulting Firms list – where it picked up a platinum rating in sustainability, among several other categories.
Drawing on that expertise, BIP and BIP.Verco have collaborated with MSc students from Imperial College London on two consulting projects focused on some of the most pressing challenges in the energy transition: large-scale hydrogen storage and accelerating decarbonisation planning.
Tackling the challenge of industrial-scale hydrogen storage
First, BIP has supported a project examining the feasibility of artificial salt caverns for industrial-scale hydrogen storage. As renewable energy capacity grows, the ability to store large volumes of hydrogen safely, economically and at scale remains a significant challenge.
The Imperial College team assessed whether artificial salt caverns could provide a viable solution. The students benchmarked 17 competing storage technologies across 36 metrics, before developing a dynamic CAPEX/OPEX and levelised-cost model and a bankable business case incorporating revenue modelling.
The resulting analysis found that salt caverns can lead on cost and round-trip efficiency above a critical volume threshold, although the optimal storage solution remains dependent on factors including end use, geography and supply chain.
Importantly, the work has gone beyond the academic exercise. The findings have been distilled into a repeatable four-stage go-to-market advisory offering, providing BIP with a framework that can now be taken into client conversations.
Using AI to accelerate decarbonisation planning
Meanwhile, BIP’s practice BIP.Verco focused on second project – answering a different challenge. This time, Imperial College London sought to make the financial modelling behind decarbonisation faster, more scalable and easier for organisations to act upon.
The team developed an AI-powered rapid decarbonisation cost tool, modernising BIP.Verco’s existing modelling logic and consolidating proprietary and external cost data into a high-trust database covering Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions across the Real Estate and Manufacturing sectors. The resulting tool can support a range of client requirements, from rapid ballpark estimates during M&A activity through to granular five-year capital plans.
Looking ahead, this will allow multiple decarbonisation pathways to be assessed side by side, incorporating metrics including NPV and payback, and is designed to turn what has traditionally been a slow, manual modelling exercise into insights that clients can use more quickly and confidently.
Collaborating for client impact
The summer projects brought together academic research, emerging technology and real-world consulting challenges, giving students the opportunity to work on live industry problems while helping BIP explore and develop new solutions for clients. Both projects demonstrate the value that collaboration between academia and consultancy can create, according to BIP.
A release from the firm concluded, “For BIP, academic partnerships provide access to cutting-edge thinking and emerging talent, while creating an environment in which new ideas and potential offerings can be rigorously explored and pressure-tested before reaching clients. For students, they provide the opportunity to apply academic expertise to genuine commercial and sustainability challenges and see how their research can translate into practical applications. The result is a partnership that connects research, technology and consulting expertise – helping develop the next generation of talent while exploring solutions to challenges already facing organisations today.”
