Teesside CCS plan remains despite Yorks decision

Mar 18 2010 by Kelley Price, Evening Gazette

Mr Whitton said Teesside winning one of the four demonstrator projects was key to attracting more industry to the region, as industry carbon reduction targets begin to bite.

“CCS has the potential to be a sunrise industry,” he said. “Each one of these projects can create a hub. Being one of the four means follow-on projects, essentially the transport and storage network, would already have been put in place and paid for. The project will have spare capacity, making it more economical for other industrial companies and power stations to bolt onto that network, which will attract investors.”

The Tees Valley network, which could be ready in five years, would create several hundred permanent positions, 1,000 construction jobs over four years and underpin several thousand heavy industry jobs across Teesside. It would also pipe from the coal-fired Lynemouth Power Station, which fuels the nearby Rio Tinto Alcan aluminium smelter, safeguarding more than 600 jobs.

Mr Whitton said the Tees Valley pipeline was closest to deep North Sea oil fields and could be extended for enhanced oil recovery, a technology which uses to extract hard-to-reach oil. It is believed there is still as much untapped North Sea oil as has already been recovered.

Mr Whitton said the Yorkshire and Humber project would use fields suitable for carbon storage but not large-scale enhanced oil recovery.

“It would be an extra 150 miles to take the project to the main oil fields compared to Teesside, which makes it far less economic,” he said. “We are structuring our project to make it possible.”

Government funding awarded recently to develop other CCS demonstration plants at E.ON’s Kingsnorth power station in Kent and ScottishPower’s Longannet site in Scotland was a “slight concern”, he added, as it nudged the projects ahead in the race.