UKCCSRC workshop – Lessons from amine post-combustion projects – London, September 2024

What lessons need to be captured from amine post-combustion projects to enable costs to come down in the future?

A report from a UKCCSRC stakeholder workshop held at the National Audit Office, London, on September 5th 2024.

The National Audit Office’s (NAO’s) Value for Money (VfM) report on the UK’s ‘Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage programme’ identifies the centrality of demonstrating VfM in the decisions about offering, or not offering, public money to CCS projects.  This was discussed in July’s UKCCSRC newsletter introduction, which also describes how the UKCCSRC can help to facilitate successful delivery of VfM for the UK’s Track 1 CCS projects through Knowledge Exchange (KE) for learning by doing.

The newsletter was also reproduced as a LinkedIn article, and was followed by another LinkedIn article on August 15th announcing that UKCCSRC would be holding a Chatham House rule workshop in Central London on September 5th. The workshop included an introduction from the NAO on their report, followed by a discussion on how lessons from amine post-combustion projects can be used to enable costs to come down in the future.  Invitations were also sent directly to organisations who were thought to have a direct interest in the topic.

National Audit Office, London

The meeting was held at the NAO building in Victoria with sixteen attendees representing a mix of UK CCS project developers, technology providers, construction organisations, an environmental NGO, government, academia, a regulator, an international CCS support organisation and a trade organisation, in addition to two UKCCSRC organisers/facilitators and the NAO host.

The workshop looked in particular at KE into the public domain for the five amine post-combustion capture (PCC) projects proposed for the Track 1 clusters, as the first UK examples of ‘doing’ to support ‘learning’.  Although there will be specific details that differ between these projects (e.g. the solvent composition for amine capture, the flue gas being treated and how the heat for solvent regeneration is supplied), the starting premise is that all details, both design decisions and subsequent performance, are potentially of significant value for future cost reduction.

The final output from this meeting was a much-expanded (from the straw man) listing of this information in the areas of project design, finance, construction and operation, given in Section 3. Although, as currently drafted, this document contains some duplication, and also some material that may not strictly relate to the topic, it is being presented ‘as is’ to give the most complete impression from the workshop of the specific details that the community would value in KE from an amine capture project.

Read the full report here