Former Artenius UK boss set to invite ex-employees back

Feb 2 2010 By Sue Scott, Evening Gazette

Sometime over the next few weeks former Artenius employees on Teesside will be receiving a call they never expected. Sue Scott met the man who's spent the past six months preparing himself to pick up the phone.

Cluster shake-up's bearing fruit

THE first concrete evidence that a shake-up of the Wilton site - one of the most vulnerable clusters in Europe - was bearing fruit emerged today.

A new strategy, headed by bosses at the Teesside site and co-ordinated by the North East Process Industry Cluster, has resulted in detailed proposals for a £2bn carbon capture and storage project, which will reduce industrial emissions and has the potential to simultaneously boost North Sea oil and gas production.

The project, likely to qualify for a significant slice of Government funding, would capture 7.5m tonnes of from a planned Progressive Energy power plant at Eston Grange on Teesside and Rio Tinto's Alcan Power Plant in Lynemouth north of Newcastle. The emissions would be piped to undersea storage beds.

Eventually, as much as 15m tonnes of could be diverted as the project is extended to other industrial users.

Although the second stage depends on private investment, process chiefs say they are now confident the project will be up and running by 2015.

Such a scheme could be key to securing the future of the Wilton cluster, which is disadvanaged by its diverse ownership base.

Richard Evans of consultant KPMG said such schemes were necessary to stay ahead of competition from the East.