SABIC joins Teesside CCS Collective

SABIC has become the latest partner to join the UK’s Teesside Collective – an initiative aiming to create Europe’s first CCS-equipped industrial zone.

The chemicals major, which employs around 1,000 at its operations at Wilton in Teesside, joins BOC, Lotte Chemical, CF Fertilisers, and Sembcorp Utilities as the latest industrial partner planning to share pipelines and storage to make CCS a reality for heavy industry. SABIC’s operations emit around 1.25m t/y of CO2.

SABIC says it will bring experience gained from operating the world’s largest CO2 utilisation plant in Saudi Arabia, which compresses around 1,500 t/d of CO2 from its glycol plants to make urea and methanol.

Using captured CO2 to produce value-added products is one of the key aims of the Collective.

Commenting on SABIC joining the collective, Neil Kenley, director of the local authority that leads the initiative said: “This demonstrates the positive direction and growing support behind our work to decarbonise UK industry.”

The Teesside process industry cluster produces 5.6% of the UK’s industrial carbon emissions, and per capita emissions are almost three times higher than in the rest of the UK. It is the most carbon-intensive region of the country but vital to the UK’s economy, employing 20,000 people and adding around £10bn to the UK’s GDP.

Last year, the Collective published a blueprint on how to make industrial CCS a reality by 2024. There are four “anchor projects” in the Collective which necessarily produce large amounts of CO2 in their processes – steelmaker SSI, fertiliser producer GrowHow, polyester producer Lotte Chemical, and industrial gas firm BOC.

They say that by using existing and proven technologies, they could capture 2.8m t/y of CO2, a quarter of Teesside’s total CO2 emissions, and store it permanently in aquifers beneath the North Sea. After expansion, with other companies joining the scheme, up to 5m t/y of CO2 could be transported down a shared pipeline.