bp and partners award first engineering contracts advancing major UK power and carbon capture projects
Thursday 16 December 2021
On behalf of its partners, bp – the operator of Net Zero Teesside Power (NZT Power) and the Northern Endurance Partnership (NEP) – has awarded contracts as part of its dual Front End Engineering Design (FEED) competition to two separate consortiums of engineering, carbon capture licensors, power providers and EPC contractors.
The awards represent an important next step towards the proposed development of the UK’s first full-scale integrated power and carbon capture project. Investing in carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) is a key point of the UK government’s 10-point plan for a green industrial revolution, announced in November 2020.
In October 2021, the UK government selected the Northern Endurance Partnership’s East Coast Cluster as one of the first two clusters be taken forward as part of its carbon capture and storage (CCUS) cluster sequencing process. The Northern Endurance partnership, which bp leads as operator, will provide the common infrastructure needed to transport CO2 from emitters across the Humber and Teesside to secure offshore storage in the Endurance aquifer in the Southern North Sea.
The two groups will now design and submit development plans for NZT Power’s proposed power station and carbon capture plant, and NEP’s planned Teesside high pressure carbon dioxide (CO2) compression and export facilities.
The two selected contractor groups are:
Technip Energies and General Electric consortium: led by Technip Energies and including Shell as a subcontractor for the provision of the licensed Cansolv CO2 capture technology and Balfour Beatty as the nominated construction partner.
Aker Solutions Doosan Babcock and Siemens Energy consortium: led by Aker Solutions and including Aker Carbon Capture as a subcontractor for the provision of the licensed CO2 capture technology.
The two consortiums will each deliver a comprehensive FEED package, led from their UK offices, over the next 12 months. Following the completion of the FEED process, the two consortiums will then submit Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) proposals for the execution phase. As part of the Final Investment Decision expected in 2023, a single consortium will be selected to take the project forward into construction.
NZT Power, a joint venture between bp and Equinor, is a full-scale gas fired-power station fully integrated with carbon capture. The project is expected to provide flexible, dispatchable low carbon electricity to complement the growing deployment of intermittent forms of renewable energy such as wind and solar.
The contracts also include FEED for NEP’s Teesside facilities that will gather and compress CO2 from NZT Power and other regional sources and export it offshore for permanent sub-surface storage in the Endurance carbon store. NEP will also take CO2 captured from a range of projects in the Humber region as part of the East Coast Cluster. The Northern Endurance Partnership is a joint venture between bp, Equinor, National Grid Ventures, Shell and TotalEnergies.
Taking emissions from both the Teesside and Humber regions, the East Coast Cluster has the potential to transport and securely store nearly 50% of all UK industrial cluster CO2 emissions – up to 27 million tonnes of CO2 emissions a year by 2035. It anticipates creating and supporting an average of 25,000 jobs over 2023 to 2050, with approximately 41,000 jobs at the project’s peak in 2026.
NZT Power expects to submit a bid in January 2022 for selection as part of the phase-2 of the UK government’s carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) cluster sequencing process. In October, the Northern Endurance Partnership-led East Coast Cluster was named as a Track-1 cluster in the first phase of the sequencing process.