New £75m Humber initiative could cut UK carbon emissions by 15 per cent

The 12 partners in the Zero Carbon Humber Partnership are Associated British Ports, British Steel, Centrica Storage, Drax Group, Equinor, Mitsubishi Power, National Grid Ventures, px Group, SSE Thermal, Saltend Cogeneration Company Limited, Uniper, and the University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC).

The partnership brings together international energy companies, heavy industry, leading infrastructure and logistics operators, global engineering firms and academic

institutions in a plan to create the world’s first net zero industrial cluster by 2040. This will be done through low carbon hydrogen, carbon capture and negative emissions.

The scheme will have shared infrastructure, including a pipeline to carry hydrogen to industrial customers and carbon dioxide from power generation and industrial emitters. The carbon dioxide will be placed in permanent storage in an offshore aquifer below the seabed in the UK’s Southern North Sea.

The 12 partners said Zero Carbon Humber could reduce the UK’s annual emissions by 15 per cent and save industry around £27.5bn in carbon taxes by 2040.

It will also help to secure the future for the Humber’s traditional heavy industry and related supply chains by enabling decarbonisation and creating opportunities for growth in new technologies.

The partners said it could safeguard 55,000 existing jobs in the region, whilst creating thousands of new STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) jobs and developing skills, apprenticeships and educational opportunities in the area.

The partnership has applied for funding from Phase 2 of the Industrial Decarbonisation Challenge, which forms part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.

It will also get significant investment from the 12 companies. The bid builds on the Humber’s successful application for Phase One funding, which was announced in April.

The bid’s anchor project is the Equinor-led Hydrogen to Humber (H2H) Saltend project, which will establish the world’s largest hydrogen production plant with carbon capture at px Group’s Saltend Chemicals Park.

H2H Saltend will convert natural gas to hydrogen and capture the carbon dioxide.

In the first phase, this could reduce emissions by 900,000 tonnes a year as industrial customers switch fuel to low-carbon hydrogen. Triton Power’s gas power plant will blend hydrogen into the fuel supply via its upgraded Mitsubishi turbines.

H2H Saltend is expected to grow over time, contributing to further emissions reductions from the Chemicals Park and across the Humber.

A pipeline network, developed by National Grid Ventures, will link H2H Saltend to energy-intensive industrial sites throughout the region, enabling more decarbonisation as additional businesses switch to low carbon hydrogen and capture their carbon dioxide emissions.

At Selby in North Yorkshire, Drax Power Station will connect to the completed carbon dioxide pipeline network, underpinning the scheme through bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) – a vital negative emissions technology that Drax is pioneering.