Government Pipelines and Storage System

The CLH Pipeline System (CLH-PS), formerly the Government Pipelines and Storage System (GPSS), is a United Kingdom pipeline system run by Compañía Logística de Hidrocarburos (CLH). The network consists of over 2,500 kilometres (1,600 mi) of pipeline and 46 other facilities, and is interconnected with several other pipeline systems.

As part of the planning and preparations for World War II, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) realised that the ability to distribute aviation fuel to the RAF's aircraft and petrol to its ground support vehicles was essential to sustaining any battle, in which superiority would be gained mainly in the air. In 1936, authorisation was given to build a top secret pipeline between the two major west-coast oil importation ports, the Port of Liverpool and its Stanlow Refinery, to Avonmouth Docks near Bristol. Completed and operational from 1938, it ran directly between the two ports to allow existing road and railway-based distribution facilities to operate, irrespective of the port in which the oil or fuel was landed.

Once war had been declared in September 1939, planners recognised that the surface road distribution network - especially in the Midlands and South of England - were too vulnerable to air attack to sustain RAF activities. They hence decided to build initially a series of underground fuel storage facilities, which would then be linked to an extended national pipeline system which would run eastwards from its existing location, and then onwards to the key airfields located in the Midlands, South and East of England.

With construction undertaken at night to avoid observation from the Nazi Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft, the pipeline was extended west along the River Thames valley to supply RAF stations in Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Middlesex. Proceeding underneath London, the pipeline stretched into Kent, and also branched north east into Essex, Norfolk and Lincolnshire, where a northern extension from Liverpool also looped into the system. This enabled consistent supply to RAF stations as far east as RAF Lakenheath and RAF Mildenhall. Further extensions branched: from the original mainline to RAF stations located close-by in the Northwest, Midlands and south through Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire; and a second more southerly located eastwards loop from Bristol that supplied RAF stations in Wiltshire and Hampshire, including connecting with the existing rail-connected RAF reserve fuel depot at Micheldever and the decommissioned Fawley Refinery which had become a wartime fuel storage depot.

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