Carbon capture, in the doldrums for the last few years, has taken an important step forward in the UK with the announcement that OGCI Climate Investments has entered into a strategic partnership with BP, ENI, Equinor, Occidental Petroleum, Shell and Total to progress the Clean Gas Project on Teesside, a natural gas fuelled combined cycle plant with post combustion capture. The base case for the power plant assumes one 620 MW (net) single shaft H class CCGT unit, but the site currently under consideration could accommodate up to three units.
OGCI Climate Investments – a $1 billion technology development fund set up by the CEOs of oil and gas majors signed up to the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI) – took over the outline Clean Gas Project last year from the UK Energy Technologies Institute (which is in the process of being wound down after ten years, as planned).
The Clean Gas Project could form the heart of the Tees Valley CCUS Cluster, which “will deploy commercially viable, safe, environmentally responsible CCUS at scale.” The plan is that the cluster will combine CO2 capture from new power plants and local industrial emitters in Teesside.
CO2 captured from the Clean Gas Project power plant would be transported by pipeline for storage in a formation under the southern North Sea, making it the UK’s “first commercial full-chain carbon capture, utilisation and storage project.”
The infrastructure created would enable industrial clusters in Teesside and elsewhere to capture and store CO2 from their processes. The clean CO2 could also attract CO2-utilisation companies, the project’s proponents believe.
As the project progresses, additional partners will be sought “across the full value chain”. With these additional partners “progress of the project towards actual construction and operations will depend on agreements and approvals of all parties involved.” The hope is that the project will then progress toward engineering design in 2019.
OGCI Climate Investments currently has three other investments in CCUS (Inventys capture technology, Solidia cement manufacture using CO2, and Econic catalyst technology enabling use of CO2 as a raw material for polyol production) and says it is exploring “several early stage CCUS projects for future investment with the goal of leveraging the knowledge gained in advancing the Clean Gas Project.” OGCI and Climate Investments say that in 2019 they “will focus significant collaborative efforts to inject momentum into a global CCUS industry.”
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