The UK government has given its backing to the union of three projects concerning carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) in the Humber and Teesside regions, which together represent nearly half of the country’s industrial emissions.
The Northern Endurance Partnership – which includes oil, lubricant and energy companies BP, Total, Equinor, National Grid, Eni and Shell – will provide the geological storage for carbon in the North Sea and the pipeline network to get it there.
This network will connect with the Zero Carbon Humber (ZCH) and Net Zero Teesside (NZT) projects. ZCH plans to develop a low-carbon, industrial-scale hydrogen-production plant, one of the first in the world, as well as a pipeline network for hydrogen and carbon dioxide to connect power stations and industrial sites in the region. NZT also plans to build a carbon-gathering network to help industrial sites in the area to decarbonise, as well as a gas-fired power station equipped with carbon-capture technology.
Net Zero Teesside and Northern Endurance Partnership’s Managing Director, Andy Lane, welcomed the new funding for phase two from the government, adding:
“This support for CCUS in the UK is critical to enabling projects such as NEP, NZT and ZCH to enter front-end engineering design, a crucial step forward as we look to develop the world’s first decarbonised industrial cluster by 2030.”
In combination with private funding, the projects have now secured £229 million in investment, enough to take them through to construction, which may potentially protect thousands of jobs and create hundreds more.
