Nine projects have secured £26 million of government funding, alongside industry funds, to advance the rollout of carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) in the UK. The largest projects involve carbon capture from an industrial process and from bioenergy.

Luke Warren, chief executive of the CCSA, described the finding as a “critical first step to ensuring the first CCUS projects are up and running by the mid-2020s in a range of clusters across the country, and will help the government meet its ambition to deploy the technology at scale in the 2030s. If the UK is serious about achieving net zero emissions by 2050, this is just the sort of action that is needed now.”

Three awards were made under the £20 million Carbon Capture and Utilisation programme. 

In the largest project Tata Chemicals Europe was awarded £4.2 million towards a £17 million project.  The company’s plant in Winnington, Cheshire, which is the UK’s only manufacturer of soda ash and sodium bicarbonate, will construct a facility to capture and utilise 40,000t of carbon dioxide a year. When fully operational in 2021 it will be the largest carbon capture plant in the UK.

In addition Drax won £500,000 towards a £1 million project – the fuel cell biogenic carbon capture demonstration.

Origen Power won £249,000 towards its £356,000 oxy-fuelled flash calciner project.

In the £24 million Call for CCUS Innovation programmesix projects were awarded funding

• C-Capture for negative CO2 emissions from bioenergy with CCS (£4,915,070 towards an £11.1 million project)
• Pale Blue Dot Energy for the Acorn storage site (£4,795,017 towards an £8.1 million project)
• Tigre Technologies for integration of CCUS technology to a 200MW OCGT Tigre Project in the North Sea (£163,909 towards a £243,000 project)
• Translational Energy Research Centre (PACT-2) led by University of Sheffield / Pilot-Scale Advanced Capture Technology (PACT) (£7 million toward a £21 million project)
• Progressive Energy – HyNet Industrial CCS (£494,626 toward a £765,500 project)
• OGCI Climate Investments – clean gas project (£3.8 million toward an £18 million project)

The CCUD programme is designed to encourage industrial sites to capture carbon dioxide which could then be used commercially in industrial applications. It is intended to demonstrate how such projects can be replicated in the UK and Europe to deploy a pipeline of CCU projects for wide-scale deployment in the 2030s.