Humber Zero has entered the latest bidding round for government backing to clean up industry.
The carbon capture plan to clean up Immingham’s petrochemical and power cluster proposes connecting with wider regional plans that were part of the successful first phase of the competitive sequencing project launched in Westminster.
It was confirmed as Equinor entered its H2H Saltend hydrogen production proposal as part of the same umbrella platform, with the SSE Thermal joint venture hydrogen power station at Keadby also included.
LATEST: Key contractor appointed for Humber Zero front end engineering and design
Humber Zero is a partnership between the Phillips 66 Humber Refinery and the neighbouring VPI Immingham combined heat and power plant, and aims to remove up to eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually by 2030.
The initial carbon capture is proposed to come online by 2027, with 3.8 million tonnes the target.
Project director Jonathan Briggs said: “Industrial decarbonisation at scale using carbon capture and storage will be essential if the UK is to achieve its ambition of a Net Zero economy by 2050 and Humber Zero has the potential to enable a material first step in deploying CCS in the UK’s largest industrial cluster.
“The project will help future-proof industry which is a major economic driver for the Humber region. It will safeguard thousands of jobs and create many new ones.
“The UK’s unique geology and North Sea infrastructure offers the chance to decarbonise British industry through mitigating millions of tonnes of CO2 emissions through compression, transportation and storage in offshore underground stores.
“We’re excited to be working with the East Coast Cluster, and ultimately other nearby stores, on our journey to fully decarbonise the Humber.”
East Coast Cluster would link the Humber and Teesside industrial zones, and is one of two schemes backed by BEIS last year. It opened up the round for individual projects, with decisions anticipated in the coming months.
Phillips 66 UK decarbonisation lead and technical manager at Humber Refinery, Chris Gilbert, said: “This is another important milestone for the project.
“The front-end engineering design stage, which began last year following support from UKRI, is on track to be completed in 2023.
“Once the CO2 is captured, it needs transporting and safely storing and this application, if successful, would link us via a pipeline to the East Coast Cluster.”
The Humber Zero project incorporates post-combustion carbon capture from the 1,240MW VPI Immingham Power Station and from the fluidised catalytic cracker at the refinery. It produces a key ingredient for electric vehicle batteries.
Technology would be retrofitted to capture and compress the carbon dioxide.
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