Costain completes milestone in carbon capture project

Costain has successfully completed a key milestone in the journey towards the UK’s first fully decarbonised industrial cluster.

When finished, the CO₂ emitted from a variety of industries on Teesside will be captured, transported and securely stored under the North Sea.

The Costain project team, which included Mott MacDonald and px Group, has now completed the first phase of the engineering design for the onshore CO₂ gathering pipelines for the Northern Endurance Partnership, the CO₂ transportation and storage company that will serve the ECC carbon capture and storage project.

The pipeline networks will take the CO₂ from a variety of carbon capture projects, including Net Zero Teesside Power’s CCGT generating station, which will be the world’s first commercial scale gas-fired power station with carbon capture.

Alongside the pipeline, the project team also need to consider broader challenges including routing of the high voltage electrical connection, rail, road and rivers crossings.

The team, based in Redcar at the Wilton Centre, used laser scanning and modelling techniques to design the route for the new CO₂ gathering network, which includes the crossing of the river Tees, natural gas pipeline and high voltage infrastructure.

The front end engineering design (FEED) was carried out for the Northern Endurance Partnership and Net Zero Teesside Power, which are key elements of the ECC, which was selected by the UK Government as a track 1 cluster as part of the cluster sequencing process for carbon capture, usage and storage in 2021. The ECC is on course for first commercial operations by 2027.

Sam White, Costain’s natural resources managing director, commented:“The East Coast Cluster has the potential to capture and store up to 23m tonnes of CO₂ a year and make a huge contribution to the UK’s net zero goals. Innovative schemes like this one are vital to ensure we grow regional economies in a sustainable way.”

Ben Ken, Northern Endurance Partnership deputy director said: “The successful design of the Northern Endurance Partnership’s onshore CO₂ pipeline network on Teesside is a key milestone for the wider East Coast Cluster, which has a crucial role to play in decarbonising the industrial powerhouse regions of Teesside and the Humber”.