CCUS: Carbon capture and hydrogen projects in line for billions in funding

BY STEVE RANGER, EDITOR IN CHIEF

The UK Government has confirmed up to £21.7bn in funding over 25 years for carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) and hydrogen projects.

The projects – Teesside and Merseyside – will help remove over 8.5m t of carbon emissions each year and could directly create 4000 jobs and support 50,000 jobs in the long-term, the Government said.

CCUS technology aims to collect CO₂ from industrial processes before it reaches the atmosphere and instead stores or reuses it.

The Government said the funding for the two projects will also bring as much as £8bn in private investment to the areas, ‘and set the UK on course to become a global leader in CCUS and hydrogen’ and pave the way for the UK’s first large-scale hydrogen production plant. The Government also said a carbon capture industry could add around £5bn/year to the UK economy by 2050 and that the UK has enough capacity to store 200 years’ worth of emissions.

On Merseyside, HyNet is being developed by a consortium to produce, store and distribute hydrogen as well as capturing and storing carbon in depleted gas reservoirs in Liverpool Bay. It has an initial storage capacity of 4.5m t/year of CO₂ in the first phase, and the potential to increase to 10m t/year of CO₂ after 2030.

The sectors involved include chemicals, cement, glass, oil refining, food and drink, paper and automotive. The aim is to transform one of the UK’s most energy-intensive industrial regions into one of the world’s first low-carbon industrial areas. The project will also develop a low emission hydrogen supply chain by integrating existing natural gas plants with CCS activities.

The East Coast Cluster aims to reduce the carbon emissions from Teesside and Humber, which currently accounts for nearly half the carbon emissions from UK industrial clusters, through a mix of industrial carbon capture, low-carbon hydrogen production, negative emissions power and power with carbon capture.

Some critics have argued that it would be more effective to spend government money on cutting household emissions and a group of scientists wrote to the Government warning that CCUS investments could lock the UK into using fossil fuel-based energy generation.

But Emma Pinchbeck, Energy UK’s Chief Executive, said: ‘CCUS is a tool in our armoury of technologies, which we need to decarbonise parts of energy that we currently can’t do with clean electricity, such as major industrial processes.’

Myles Allen, Professor of geosystem sciences, University of Oxford, UK, said the world is going to generate more carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels than we can afford to dump into the atmosphere. ‘It is utterly unrealistic to pretend otherwise. So, we need to scale up a massive global carbon dioxide disposal industry to have any hope of meeting our climate goals.’

Geoffrey Maitland, Professor of energy engineering at Imperial College London, said decarbonising the electricity grid through replacing fossil fuel generation by renewables is not one of the biggest challenges to meeting the net-zero target.

‘The hard stuff is decarbonising the major industries, which generate CO₂ as a byproduct; such as cement manufacture, key to the construction industry, and steel and chemicals production where, even if they can in time be powered by electricity rather than fossil fuels, there will not be enough spare renewable electricity to do this for decades,’ he said.

He added the same is true of hydrogen, where CCS-enabled production of blue hydrogen from natural gas, while capturing and storing the CO₂ byproduct, will enable decarbonised hydrogen to be used as a fuel ‘decades before we have enough spare renewable electricity to produce it in sufficient volumes by electrolysing water’.

Indeed, others have argued that the rate of investment in CCUS projects is nowhere near high enough, warning that assumptions about how much CO₂ can be stored underground using carbon capture technologies may be overly optimistic, unless there is more investment in the sector. Deployment of CCS technology has already fallen short even of near-term projections, according to a recent paper from researchers at Imperial College London, UK.