BP picks contractors for UK’s landmark carbon capture and storage cluster prize

Oil and gas major BP has selected two consortia of engineering, ‎carbon capture licensors, power providers, and EPC contractors to participate in a Front End Engineering Design (FEED) ‎competition to advance the development of one of the first decarbonised industrial ‎clusters in the UK and the world.

The lucky winner to take the project forward into construction will be selected in 2023.

BP awarded the contracts as part of the dual FEED competition for the Net Zero Teesside Power project and the Northern Endurance ‎Partnership’s carbon compression infrastructure in Teesside. Both projects are operated by BP.

Investing in carbon capture, usage ‎and storage (CCUS) is a key point of the UK

government’s ten0-point plan for a green industrial ‎revolution and this award represents the next step towards the proposed development of the UK’s ‎first full-scale integrated power and carbon capture project.

As previously reported, the UK government in October 2021 selected the Northern Endurance Partnership’s East ‎Coast Cluster as one of the first two clusters to be taken forward as part of its CCUS cluster sequencing process. The other selected cluster is HyNet.

The Northern Endurance partnership 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.‎

Following the award of FEED contracts, the two consortia 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 CO2 compression and export facilities.‎

FEED prize winners

The first group of contractors includes 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.‎

The second group is a consortium between Aker Solutions, Doosan Babcock, and Siemens Energy, which is led by Aker Solutions ‎and includes Aker Carbon Capture as a subcontractor for the provision of the licensed ‎CO2 capture technology.‎

Over the next year, each group will deliver a comprehensive FEED package, led from their UK ‎offices. Once the FEED process has been completed, the two ‎groups 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, BP said on the 15^th December.

Louise Kingham, BP’s UK head of country and senior vice president of Europe, said: “This first-of-a-kind project has the ‎potential to deliver enough low carbon, flexible electricity to power around 1.3 million homes, ‎and can help secure Teesside’s position at the green heart of the country’s energy transition.”

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.

According to BP, the East Coast Cluster has the ‎potential to transport and store nearly 50 per cent of all UK industrial cluster CO2 emissions, which is up to 27 million tonnes of CO2 emissions a year by 2035. In addition, 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.

The Northern Endurance Partnership-led East Coast Cluster was in October named as a Track-1 ‎cluster in the first phase of the sequencing process and now NZT Power expects to submit a bid in January 2022 for selection as part of the phase-2 of the ‎UK government’s CCUS cluster sequencing process.

Ewan Drummond, BP’s senior vice president, projects, said: “The signing of the dual FEED ‎contracts today is the culmination of an extensive market engagement process over the ‎past 18 months, and we are excited to be working with the selected Aker and Technip UK-‎led consortiums.”

Arnaud Pieton, CEO of Technip Energies, emphasised that this project perfectly illustrates that cross-industries collaboration is ‎central to reaching net-zero targets.

Source: Offshore Energy Today