Carbon Capture Technology Selection Lessons Learnt shared with Industry

A major carbon capture project which aims to prevent millions of tonnes of industrial carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from being released into the atmosphere as greenhouse gas has published lessons learnt from its early development phase with the aim of helping other similar projects now being developed.

The Humber Zero project has published a report on how the carbon capture technology was selected. With the potential to capture up to 8 million tonnes of CO₂ from the Immingham industrial area in North Lincolnshire. Humber Zero will be one of the largest projects of its type in the world and a first of a kind for a refinery.

The project’s collaborators VPI Immingham LLP and Phillips 66 Limited both announced earlier this year that they had chosen Shell Cansolv as the technology solution. The selection followed a rigorous assessment of a number of providers and the technology will be crucial to the project meeting its aims.

VPI Immingham project director, Jonathan Briggs, said: “Achieving Net Zero in the UK will be a national effort and sharing knowledge with other projects at an earlier stage of development is important.

“Humber Zero is a pioneering project for capturing CO₂ on an industrial scale from two major industrial sites, so the process for selecting this technology was extremely thorough. If other projects can learn from our experiences when delivering their projects, then we could realise our Net Zero ambitions more quickly and efficiently.”

Mike Wailes Emerging Energy (Europe) Commercial Manager, at the Phillips 66 Humber Refinery said: “Our project has the potential to support change across industry, both within the Humber region and globally. There are roughly 300 Fluid Catalytic Crackers (FCC) across the world, where the knowledge from Humber Zero could be leveraged. The carbon reduction technology we will be implementing will capture around 95% of CO₂ emissions from the FCC unit at the Phillips 66 Humber Refinery. We are grateful to UKRI for their funding support towards this exciting project.”

The report is available to view publicly on the Humber Zero by clicking here.

Humber Zero is a group of projects capturing CO₂ from two of the three generators and the auxiliary boilers at the VPI Immingham combined heat and power plant and from the Fluid Catalytic Cracker at the Phillips 66 Humber Refinery.

The front-end engineering and design phase of the project has received £12.5 million of funding from UKRI’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, with this total being matched by the Humber Zero partner companies.

The Humber region is the largest industrial emitter of CO₂ in the UK, emitting around 50 per cent more than the next largest. The region is home to a large number of energy intensive industries and accounts for approximately 10 per cent of jobs in the area.