CCUS investment: What is actually happening and when?

In the lead-up to this month’s UK investment summit, the government announced “a new era for clean energy investment and jobs” thanks to carbon capture. What does this mean in reality?

What is CCUS?

Carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) or carbon capture and storage (CCS) is the process of removing carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere in order to repurpose and/or store them. The Climate Change Committee has described CCS as “a necessity, not an option” for industry and probably for hydrogen and electricity production.

What is the government promising?

The previous government’s Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution set out the ambition of becoming a world leader in CCUS technology, capturing 10 megatonnes of CO₂ by 2030. It had chosen two sites for the first phase of its programme (“Track 1”). The current government has now greenlit major funding for these sites.

Why use CCUS?

Globally, most CCUS projects (around 80%) are connected to the extraction of fossil fuels. The carbon captured from a process such as refining oil is then re-injected into the site of oil extraction to get more oil out. Obviously in these cases the carbon removed from the atmosphere is outweighed by the climate impact of the fossil fuels extracted.

The UK’s CCUS strategy gives the technology a different role: minimising the impact of so-called “hard-to-abate” sectors such as heavy industry and shipping. This is what the Climate Change Committee has recommended.

Where are the two new CCUS sites?

The Hynet North West programme covers parts of north-west England and north Wales. Carbon capture will happen at the Stanlow Manufacturing Complex in Cheshire.

The East Coast Cluster is in the Teesside and Humber region. The Humber is currently the UK’s highest-emitting industrial region, which is a major reason why it was chosen for CCUS.

The Stanlow complex

The Stanlow facility at the heart of the HyNet cluster is currently the UK’s second largest oil refinery. The plan is to use a technology called LCH^TM, developed by Johnson Matthey, to create blue hydrogen there.

Most hydrogen is produced by putting a fossil fuel through a process called steam methane reformation, a very carbon-intensive process. “Blue hydrogen” is the energy industry term for hydrogen where CCUS has prevented the emissions from its production from reaching the atmosphere. Johnson Matthey say that their LCH method captures up to 99% of the carbon dioxide from hydrogen production.

The hydrogen will then be transported by pipeline to industry in the region as a replacement for natural gas. Some will be blended into the home heating network for the same purpose.  

The East Coast cluster

The government plans a network of carbon dioxide transport and storage facilities across the Humber region. Central to its success will be the proposed Humber Carbon Capture Pipeline, which will run underground but connect to projects above ground. It will transport the CO₂ from these projects to be stored underground in the North Sea. The main route of the pipeline would be between Drax power station in north Yorkshire and Easington on the east Yorkshire coast.

Where will the captured carbon go?

The government says that it can be “stored safely beneath the seabed”, which is why both new clusters depend heavily on links to the North Sea coast. It calculates that there is enough capacity there to store 200 years’ worth of emissions. In March 2023 the previous government announced that it was working on a “treasure map” of possible storage sites. The North Sea Transition Authority, which acts as regulator in this area, has legal powers to request information from companies with drilling licences.

How much will it cost?

The government has promised up to £21.7bn of public investment across these two clusters. This won’t be spent in one go, but over the next 25 years. The government has not yet said how much of it will be spent in the lifetime of the current parliament.

Controversy

In September 2024 a group of scientists wrote an open letter to Ed Miliband expressing concern that the new CCUS facilities will “lock the UK into fossil fuel based energy generation to well beyond 2050”. Since supplies of North Sea fossil fuels are declining, this could put the UK in the position of having to import fossil fuels from overseas, increasing the potential for emissions leakage in the process.

Some industry and environmental voices have also criticised the government’s failure to carry out an audit of other options to ensure the carbon emissions from CCUS cannot be reduced or eliminated in other ways. This is normally a precondition of net zero investment decisions.