SUEZ Teesside carbon capture plans take step forward

Earlier this week (22 March), plans to develop carbon capture and storage (CCS) from SUEZ’s energy-from-waste (EfW) facility at Teesside were approved to progress as part of the Government’s plan for industrial decarbonisation in the North-East of England.

SUEZ made two successful applications to the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy to develop CCS plants at its Tees Valley (Lines 1 and 2) and Tees Valley (Line 3) EfW plants. Moving ahead to the Phase 2 evaluation stage of the Government’s Carbon Capture Utilisation and Storage Cluster Sequencing Process scheme, the emitter projects within each of the low-carbon industrial clusters will be examined, with SUEZ’s EfW plants falling under the scheme’s industrial model.

Plans to develop a commercial-scale CCS plant at SUEZ’s Tees Valley (Lines 1 and 2) facility were first announced in November 2020, after the company signed a memorandum of understanding with BP. The original project aimed to capture the carbon dioxide from the facility’s flue gas emissions, moving this to a geological storage site beneath the North Sea.

Last autumn, SUEZ’s East Coast Cluster – including the Teeside and Humber areas – was selected by the Government as one of the UK’s first two low-carbon industrial clusters to receive support for deploying CCS at scale. The HyNet North West decarbonisation project was also named as an eligible project, which aims to create infrastructure to produce, transport, and store low-carbon hydrogen across the North West and North Wales, alongside new CCS infrastructure.

John Scanlon, Chief Executive Officer for SUEZ recycling and recovery UK said: “At SUEZ we have a clear focus on reducing the carbon footprint of our customers’ waste. We’re investing in innovation at every stage, from ways to reduce the carbon content of the waste coming into our energy recovery facilities, such as our work on recycling flexible plastics at scale, through to capturing the carbon from flue gas emissions at the end of the process.

“With a solid operational track record and the benefit of being located on the planned route of the pipeline that will transport CO2 from Teesside to the storage location, our facilities are ideally placed to become one of the UK’s first carbon capture from energy-from-waste projects.”