UKCCSRC Spring 2025 Conference – Plenary 1 (ECR Meeting Fund)

Shadi Samizadeh (University of Lincoln), Mike Ownsworth (University of Sheffield) and Karim Elamawy (University of Sheffield) share their takeaways from the “Plenary 1” session at the UKCCSRC Spring 2025 Conference.

Ian Hunter – Teesside Net Zero Power – Building the Future of Carbon Capture: Lessons from the East Coast Cluster

The journey to a low-carbon future isn’t just about ambition—it’s about making the right decisions, navigating challenges and bringing together the right people. The East Coast Cluster (ECC) is a prime example of this. As one of the UK’s leading CCS projects, it’s paving the way for large-scale CO₂ reduction. But getting there has been a long, complex process.

At the heart of the ECC are two major projects: Net Zero Teesside Power (NZT Power) and the Northern Endurance Partnership (NEP). Together, they aim to capture and store CO₂ emissions, helping the UK meet its net-zero targets.

NZT Power is a new-build power station designed to capture 95% of its emissions using an amine-based carbon capture system.

NEP is developing the Endurance Store, a massive saline aquifer in the North Sea, to permanently store CO₂.

With Teesside and the Humber as key industrial hubs, this project makes sense. There’s existing infrastructure, skilled workers, and a history of industrial development.

Challenges in Building CCS Infrastructure

Developing large-scale CCS isn’t just about technology—it’s also about strategy, investment and policy. Some of the key challenges include:

• Balancing Costs and Efficiency: Deciding between aquifers and depleted gas stores, investing in pre-built pipeline capacity and ensuring the capture plant can ramp up with power demand.
• Government Policies and Business Models: At the time of development, business models for CCS were still evolving. Companies had to take a leap of faith, investing heavily without a clear guarantee of government support.
• Land and Regulatory Processes: Securing land, handling environmental regulations and getting Development Consent Orders (DCOs) took years. The process started in 2019 and was only approved in 2023.
• Collaboration Across Multiple Stakeholders: With joint ventures, banks, contractors and government agencies all involved, aligning interests and decision-making was a challenge.

Lessons Learned

1. Strong Partnerships Matter
   NZT Power and NEP are structured as joint ventures, with BP providing operator services. This helped pool resources, spread risks and ensure technical expertise was in place.
2. Early Planning for Land and Regulations is Crucial
   From CO₂ pipelines to power station connections, securing land and regulatory approvals took longer than expected. Future projects need to streamline this process.
3. Competitive Contracting Drives Innovation
   A competitive process for front-end engineering led to better cost efficiency and technical advancements, particularly in power and CO₂ capture flexibility.
4. Local Benefits Are Key
   Beyond reducing emissions, these projects bring jobs, skills and investment to local communities. Working with schools, apprenticeships and regional businesses has been essential in gaining support.

What’s Next for CCS in the UK?

The UK has a long history of CCS projects, and the East Coast Cluster builds on that foundation. The government’s approach has evolved, aiming to create business models that attract investment while ensuring affordability.

Looking ahead, the challenge will be scaling up CCS quickly and efficiently. There’s a push for more competitive bidding, similar to offshore wind projects, but whether that will work for CCS remains to be seen. What’s clear is that the ECC has set a precedent, showing that with the right planning, partnerships and investment, large-scale CCS is possible.

This is just the beginning. With continued progress, the UK could become a global leader in CCS technology, helping industries transition to a low-carbon future while ensuring energy security and economic growth.

Jeremy Carey Exergetic Ltd and Chair of UKCCS Board

Jeremy presented a chronological retrospective story of carbon capture in the UK told in a series of memes. He quoted Douglas Adams’ three stages of life regarding the perception of inventions at the different stages of life (before birth, between 15 and 35 years old, and after the age of 35). These stages end with the statement that anything invented after someone is thirty-five is against the natural order of the world. He pointed out that almost all company directors are at that stage of their lives.

He related an anecdote about Lord Oxburgh saying that carbon capture is the only technology that can’t be lived without. The alternative to carbon capture is that everyone in the world should be persuaded to resist temptation and leave fossil fuels in the ground forever. He left a dramatic pause to let the audience consider whether this is likely to be successful.

Jeremy discussed the stage play, Kyoto, about the negotiations of the COP agreements. He then showed a chart of increasing annual greenhouse gas emissions with the COP summit marked (shown in the first figure above). He pointed out that there was no change in rate of growth at each of the COP summits, though the COVID pandemic could be seen and the ‘70s oil crisis and Jeremy didn’t mention it, but there was also a dip at the end of the first decade of this century when the banking crisis happened. So much for global agreements.

Moving to a different point, Jeremy quoted, “If a problem takes a million pounds to solve then this is probably OK. If it takes a billion pounds, then this is a longer conversation”.

Jeremy described a SSE/Shell partnership of approximately £1 billion. Shell considers risk differently to the way which has become normal. Shell considers risk on a chart set against an axis of control/influence. There is a line plotted on that chart which Jeremy called “the line of tolerable ambiguity”. There was a realisation that, as politicians change every four years, there are likely to be many politicians in office during a CCS project and so the partners had almost no influence to manage the risk. Large point-to-point capture and storage projects came to an end in the UK ( a “dead in the water” made the point). But . . . clusters were alive! With clusters came complexity and slowness.

At the end Jeremy mentioned the “Drill baby, drill” quote from a certain US politician and how it changes the landscape. He described how some US companies want to avoid being seen as pro net zero. Jeremy used an analogy of thermodynamics to financial sense. If something is thermodynamically possible, it will eventually happen. Otherwise not. If a project makes financial sense with only a sensible subsidy, it will eventually happen. Otherwise, the risk of the subsidy being reversed is too great.

At the end of his presentation, Jeremy took a question about whether CCS really abated existing emitters or only abated new emitters. His answer was that, in his view, flexible generation with CCS enables renewable and sustainable generation to be fully exploited. When renewables are unavailable, the flexible generation with CCS can be used but turned off when the wind blows and the sun shines. For this reason, CCS gives better than one-for-one abatement.