UKRI has Awarded £171 Million to Projects in Pursuit of the UK Government’s Net Zero Targets

The projects and the funding awarded to them are: 

• HyNet - (offshore – £13,324,521) / (onshore – £19,451,381)
  A full chain hydrogen and CCUS industrial decarbonisation project, which incorporates a dedicated network transporting hydrogen from production to demand points and storage assets, with infrastructure to transport and store the CO₂ produced as a by-product of the hydrogen production process and CO₂ from a number of the UK’s largest industrial emitters.

• Scotland’s net zero infrastructure (offshore – £11,347,956) / (onshore – £19,956,777)
  A project which focuses on developing the offshore Acorn storage site and associated offshore infrastructure. It will fund important engineering studies and develop the key onshore and offshore pipeline, subsea and well-related infrastructure to transport and inject CO2 offshore for long-term secure storage.
• Net zero Teesside (onshore) – £28,052,338
  A project to develop a flexible gas power plant with CCUS, which will allow CO₂ to be stored in a geological aquifer located in the Southern North Sea.
• Northern endurance partnership – £24,002,130
  A project to create an offshore CO₂ transport and storage system connecting two first-of-a-kind onshore capture projects into one initial geological store.
• Zero Carbon Humber (ZCH) partnership – £21,496,246
  A project to develop CO₂ and hydrogen transmission pipelines linking the region’s major emitters and enabling CO₂ emissions to be captured and transported, and fuel-switching of end-users to H₂ for a long-term sustainable transition to low-carbon energy. A low-carbon ammonia export product will also be developed and the project will seek to partially decarbonise all other products produced on-site.
• Humber Zero – £12,692,948
  A project to retrofit a post combustion capture plant to two existing gas turbines and auxiliary boilers at VPI Immingham’s combined heat and power plant, and a major process unit at Phillips 66’s Humber refinery.
• South Wales Industrial Cluster (SWIC) – £19,999,997
  A project to support regional hydrogen deployment and to develop CCUS as an interim measure. The project also aims to provide the UK with lower carbon steel and reduced carbon cement products that form the backbone of the wider UK Infrastructure Industry.

Further details as to the project sponsors and locations can be found on the UKRI website (UKRI press release).

These nine green tech projects will undertake engineering and design studies for the development of decarbonization infrastructure in the UK, with particular focus on carbon capture and storage and hydrogen projects. The government support is directed towards the key UK industrial regions of Merseyside, South Wales, Teesside, Humberside and Aberdeenshire.

Each of the projects has considered the number of jobs created alongside the reduction of carbon emissions in putting together their plans, with a view to decarbonising key industrial clusters. It is estimated that in aggregate 80,000 UK jobs will be created over the next 30 years as a result of these projects, while cutting emissions by two thirds in just 15 years.

This funding illustrates the commitment to invest in large scale climate change projects ahead of COP26, to be held in Glasgow in November 2021, and is a step in the right direction to the extent that hydrogen and CCUS are to be an important part of the energy transition.