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Building on CCS Cluster Momentum

Energy Transition Commentary:

CCS is gathering momentum in the North Sea and across the world – but others are moving quickly so how can the UK become a major player?

Key messages:

Recent progress on UK long-term investment in CCS, signing of contract for the first projects as part of the East Coast Teesside Cluster and setting up a new Green Partnership with Norway to collaborate on CCS and other energy issues is very encouraging that the UK is on track to meet its near-term CCS targets;
However, recent announcements of progress on near-commercial projects in other countries, such as Norway, Denmark, Australia, Qatar and the US indicate that the UK is still some way behind many countries, including close neighbours, in implementing CCS at the scale required to have a realistic chance of meeting its future carbon budgets and achieving net-zero by 2050
To catch up and establish a leading position, the UK needs to accelerate installing large-scale CCS projects and infrastructure; by exploiting its leadership in developing non-EOR business models and its world-leading CCS research to attract further collaborations with other countries who have already climbed the implementation learning curve, it can leapfrog to the large-scale capacity it needs more quickly by learning from established best practice elsewhere.

It has been encouraging to see a number of recent announcements demonstrating that the momentum for carbon storage projects in the North Sea and its link to delivering the UK net zero target is gathering pace. There have also been major announcements of large projects in Australia and the US.

On December 16, the UK and Norway announced a new Green Partnership to collaborate on clean energy, to be formally signed in spring next year[1]. This will involve building on Norway’s long experience of CCS in the North Sea, where they have been storing 1Mt CO₂ pa in the Sleipner field since 1996, 0.8Mt CO₂ pa in the Snøhvit field since 2008, as well as the recently opened Northern Lights facility in Øygarden, Bergen, Europe’s first cross-border CO₂ transport and storage facility, involving Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies and part of the Norwegian Longship initiative to decarbonise heavy industry.

This came only a week after contracts were signed for the first CCUS projects in the UK as part the East Coast low carbon industrial cluster in Teesside[2]. Construction is planned to start in mid-2025 and, following on from the government’s commitment to £21.7bn funding for CCUS over the next 25 years, is the first step in eliminating CO₂ emissions from the UK’s more difficult to decarbonise industries as well as providing reliable low-carbon power from gas through the Net Zero Teesside Power project[3]. The CO₂ captured from the Teesside cluster will be transported and stored via the infrastructure developed by the Northern Endurance Partnership[4], sponsored by BP, Equinor and TotalEnergies. Thus, the participation of these companies in major CCUS projects in both sectors of the North Sea gives a sound base on which the Green Partnership with Norway can build to accelerate the growth of the UK CCUS industry.

We consider these events happening in rapid succession to be a watershed moment for the UK’s ambition to achieve net-zero by 2050. As well as being a critical technology for meeting the UK’s future carbon budgets, and being of vital global importance, the contracts and pledged funding will result in billions of pounds worth of other contracts being awarded to supply chain companies by the East Coast Cluster projects and create thousands of new jobs in the region. The new CCUS industry uses similar skills to those underpinning the oil, gas and petrochemicals industries and so as the latter wind down over the next few decades many of their workers will be able to transition relatively easily over to this growing low-carbon sector.

We also see measures of this kind as essential to encouraging new investment into regenerating the UK’s manufacturing base, especially in areas where the industrial base has been eroded over recent decades.

The CCUS infrastructure of the East Coast Cluster will in time enable other CO₂ generating plants in the region to tap into the CO₂transport and storage network to curtail their own greenhouse gas emissions so having this in place quickly is key to broader decarbonisation. Together with the other Track 1 cluster[5], HyNet[6], and the Track 2 projects[7] Acorn[8] in Scotland and Viking[9] on Humberside, there is the capacity to store about 19Mt CO₂ pa. Encouraging as this first contract signing is, though, the process needs to accelerate rapidly to achieve the UK’s CO₂storage target, set by the Climate Change Committee, of 50Mt pa by 2035.

It is also encouraging to see some of the earlier barriers to the commercial development of CCUS in the UK being removed. The work done over the past decade to develop business models to attract investment is beginning to pay off. Regulation has a key part to play so the granting by the North Sea Transition Authority of the first-ever UK carbon storage permit to the Endurance field[10] is another watershed moment and attention to removing delays to permitting must continue from now on if we are to exploit the vast 78 Gt CO₂ storage potential of the UK offshore subsurface. Making Ofgem the regulator for the CCUS economic licence to oversee the crucial CCUS transport network[11] is also a positive step, as is the role of the Low Carbon Contracts Company in relation to implementing Dispatchable Power and Revenue Support Agreements[12].

Although this flurry of developments indicates that the direction of travel for making commercial CCS a reality in the UK is encouraging, there is no room for complacency by the government in feeling that current plans are sufficient to meet our net-zero targets. Despite recent progress, the UK is still many years behind other countries in implementing full-scale CCS operations. In the last few weeks the 220M USD Moomba CCS project has started up in South Australia[13] as the world’s third largest CCS project which does not rely on enhanced oil recovery (EOR) as a revenue stream to offset costs, with early CO₂ injection rates indicating it should exceed its design capacity of 1.7Mt CO₂ pa. The largest such project is also in Australia, the 4Mt pa Gorgon project run by Chevron in Western Australia.

There are plans to extend the Moomba project into a regional hub, with the Australian governments passing legislation to allow cross-border transfer of CO₂ and agreements already in place to transport emissions from Japan.

Denmark recently completed the pilot phase of its 23 partner EU-funded Project Greensand, lead partner INEOS aiming to start large-scale storage by the end of this year and store up to 8Mt of cross-border CO₂ pa by 2030 as an important step towards decarbonising EU industries.

In order to maximise the potential of the North Sea for storage of CO₂ from other countries without adequate subsurface storage capacity, the UK needs to follow Norway, Denmark and Australis’s lead in removing the barriers and facilitating cross-border CO₂ transport and storage.

In the USA, Exxon Mobil, has announced plans to construct a 1.5GW natural gas carbon capture power plant[14], to supply decarbonised power directly to the data centre industry to help meet its surging power demand, driven by the rapid growth of artificial intelligence, which is expected to increase electricity demand by 20%[15]. In December the Brevik CCS project, the world’s first CCS plant at a cement facility run by Heidelberg Materials and SLB Capturi[16], reached mechanical completion; after commissioning in 2025 this process will capture up to 400kt CO₂ pa.

All this indicates that in operational terms the UK is significantly behind many other countries, including China[17] in implementing CCS on a large-scale. Where we can claim world leadership is in the development of business models to make non-EOR CCS projects commercially viable and attract the required business investment[18], together with top-class university research and development on both optimising safe and secure storage and more efficient capture systems.

This means that setting up partnerships with other countries such as the one with Norway are real win-win collaborations, with both parties bringing substantial benefits to the table. The collaboration with Norway can accelerate our CCS facilities reaching full commercial status, importing best practice from elsewhere and enabling leapfrogging of pilot and much of the development phases – there is no need for the UK to re-invent the wheel for the first wave of commercial plants when others have already invested in going up the technology learning curve. There is also much to learn and exchange about the legislation and regulatory measures needed to lower the barriers to more rapid implementation and increasing business confidence to attract investment.

Professor Martin Blunt, Professor of Flow in Porous Media

Professor Paul Fennell, Professor of Clean Energy

Professor Sam Krevor, Professor of Subsurface Carbon Storage

Professor Niall Mac Dowell, Professor of Energy Systems Engineering

Professor Geoffrey Maitland, Professor of Energy Engineering

Professor Ronny Pini, Professor of Multiphase Systems

Professor Nilay Shah, Professor of Process Systems Engineering

Professor Martin Trusler, Professor of Thermophysics

Imperial College London, Transition to Net Zero Group

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-and-norway-join-forces-to-seize-green-industrial-opportunities

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/contracts-signed-for-uks-first-carbon-capture-projects-in-teesside

[3] https://www.netzeroteesside.co.uk/