Teesside Collective tenders for CCS pilot

THE Teesside Collective, a cluster of energy-intensive industrial partners in North East England hoping to set up an industrial CCS project, has issued its first tender for a CCS pilot.

The Collective, made up of companies in and around the Wilton site, includes fertiliser producer CF Fertilisers, polyester producer Lotte Chemical, industrial gas firm BOC and energy and industrial services company Sembcorp. SABIC became the latest partner in June this year. The Collective is led by Tees Valley Unlimited – the Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) – and supported by the North East Process Industry Cluster (NEPIC). It was set up in 2015.

The contract, worth around £90,000 (US$117,000), includes designing a CO₂ capture unit at Lotte and developing a business case to sell the CO₂. The contractor will also design a demonstration centre, for access by companies wanting to scale up projects to use carbon, and produce a business case to do so.

The vast majority of CCS projects focus on carbon capture from power generation, but the Teesside Collective has instead opted to focus on industrial emissions. Many industrial processes unavoidably emit CO₂, and finding a way to collect these emissions would have a very positive environmental impact. The Collective says 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. The partners hope to have a CCS scheme in place in Teesside by 2024.