Focus on the UK | Can GB deliver on CCS?


The UK government has to take action now to allow companies in the sector to take final investment decisions if it wants to turn its CCS promises into action and, possibly, a global business


Janet Wood


The UK has longstanding ambitions to be a centre for carbon capture and storage (CCS) and that remains the case. However, the nature of its ambitions has changed. Whereas two decades ago the UK imagined itself as supplying CCS equipment to the power industry, now it hopes to act as custodian of captured carbon dioxide produced by other industries that have no other way of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Below ground beneath its North Sea waters the UK has about a third of Europe’s potential storage capacity. Norway also has a third of capacity, but it is further from major emitters in Europe, while the remainder is split between different jurisdictions. The UK has the resource: but if it is to make storage a European, or even


global, business, it first has to demonstrate it at the domestic scale and convince industry that it is a reliable partner.


The UK has competition. Partly that arises from programmes in other European countries, which may not have the UK’s resources but have smaller storage areas and are going ahead with projects.


France, for example, began consulting on a CCS strategy based around industrial areas in July 2023, and it plans to begin testing storage sites this year and next. There is also competition from the USA, boosted by measures in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Esso, for example, is focusing its CCS development on the USA (and similarly its nascent hydrogen


production), attracted not only by the simplicity of the financial incentive provided by the IRA but also by the expected speed of deployment. The US began developing a regulatory framework in 2022 and it is expected to move to potential sequestering as soon as 2025.


Finally, the UK also has to face a different type of competition important to industries that emit carbon – from countries where carbon dioxide emissions are free. The UK CCSA believes one-third of the UK’s emitting industry that is considered to be part of the pipeline of customers for carbon removals “thinks about relocating where they don’t have to face costs.” To retain those industries, the UK needs to put in place takeoff agreements for carbon dioxide and


UK CCS clusters, ‘Track 1’ (the leaders)


• East Coast Cluster The East Coast Cluster aims to capture and store an average of around 23 million tonnes of CO2


per year by 2035. In this


cluster the Northern Endurance Partnership – bp, Equinor and TotalEnergies – is developing the common end-to-end CO2


transport and storage system needed to transport CO2


from emitters in the Humber and Teesside clusters to offshore storage in the Endurance aquifer in the Southern North Sea. In December 2023 the Northern Endurance Partnership agreed the key conditions for economic, regulatory and governance models of the transportation and storage of CO2


. The ‘Heads of


Terms’ agreement paves the way for the three initial projects and the Northern Endurance Partnership to take final investment decisions in September 2024. The three initial projects are: Net Zero Teesside Power (a 860 MW CCGT that would employ a GE Vernova 9HA.02 gas turbine integrated with a Technip supplied CCS system based on Shell’s Cansolv technology, capturing and storing 2Mt CO2


annually);


H2Teesside (BP’s hydrogen production plant based on steam methane reforming, targeting 1.2 GW of hydrogen production by


2030); and BOC’s Teesside SMR, one of the UK’s largest hydrogen production facilities, which in 2027 will be retrofitted with post combustion capture technology designed by Linde Engineering expected to capture 200 kt annually. Technip Energies (leader of a consortium with GE Vernova, and construction partner, Balfour Beatty) has received a letter of intent from bp on behalf of NZT Power Limited for the execution phase of Net Zero Teesside Power (which has been granted a Development Consent Order, ie planning permission). If the project comes to fruition it could be one of the world’s first commercial scale gas-fired power stations with carbon capture. Other potential cluster participants in the Teesside region include bioenergy projects MGT Teesside and Lynemouth Power, gas-fired power stations Whitetail Clean Energy and Alfabara CCGT Teesside. Potential industrial users of the transport and storage infrastructure include CF Fertilisers Billingham Ammonia CCS, Redcar Energy Project, Tees Valley Energy Recovery Facility (ie energy from waste), Lighthouse Green Fuels and Teesside Green Energy Park. Northern Endurance Partnership also says other businesses on


Visualisation of Net Zero Teesside Power and model of capture system (NZT Power and GE Vernova)


12 | May 2024| www.modernpowersystems.com


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