Essar Oil UK to build $432 million carbon capture facility at Stanlow refinery | Daily News Byte

Once completed in 2027, the plant will eliminate an estimated 0.81 million tonnes of CO2 per year, equivalent to taking 400,000 cars off the road, removing around 40% of all stanlow emissions.

Essar is investing more than £1 billion in a range of energy efficiency, fuel-switching and carbon capture initiatives, designed to significantly decarbonise its manufacturing processes by 2030 and spearheading Essar’s transition to UK low carbon energy.

Essar’s energy transition strategy is based on five principles: operating key stainless steel refining processes as efficiently and safely as possible; decarbonising Stanley’s operations; Building the hydrogen future through the launch of Vertex Hydrogen (“Vertex”) and as a core part of the HyNet consortium; developing green fuels (including sustainable aviation fuels); and establishing the UK’s largest biofuel storage facility by Stanley Terminals Limited.

Essar will achieve its decarbonisation targets through a combination of incremental (energy efficiency and operational improvements) and transformational projects including a £360 million carbon capture plant, but also as a result of the significant investments Essar is making in hydrogen and biofuels.

Kent plc has been awarded the pre-feed engineering contract to develop the facility which will take CO2 emitted from Europe’s largest full-residue fluidised catalytic cracking unit located at the Stanlow refinery.

As part of the HighNet cluster infrastructure in the North West of England, the gas will be permanently separated in a gas field emptied under the sea in Liverpool Bay.

The project was selected by BEIS as a Phase-2 winner in the CCUS cluster sequencing process earlier this summer, and as such, is currently undergoing the due diligence phase.

“This new carbon capture plant is the single largest initiative to decarbonise our processes and is a key element of our very ambitious decarbonisation strategy. Our ambition is to be a leading low carbon refinery. This is a huge undertaking, but it is a journey to which we are fully committed. Not only is it the right environmental thing to do, it will future-proof the critical Stanlow refinery for the long term, protecting jobs and industry, while placing Stanlow at the heart of the UK’s energy transition,” said Deepak Maheshwari. Essar Oil UK

Essar is already making rapid progress against its broader decarbonisation targets. In September, EOUK announced that it had signed a ‘heads of terms’ offtake agreement with Vertex, a joint venture with Progressive Energy, for the supply of 280MW+ of hydrogen.

The hydrogen will be used to help decarbonise Essar’s existing production facilities, including a new hydrogen-powered furnace that was delivered in August this year. The £45 million furnace is the first of its kind in the UK, capable of running on a 100 per cent hydrogen source and will replace three existing furnaces at Stanlow.

Vertex is developing the first large-scale, low-carbon hydrogen production hub in the UK, as part of the HighNet cluster. This would generate (in its initial stages) 1GW of hydrogen (equivalent to the energy use of a large UK city like Liverpool) and sequester around 1.8 million tonnes of carbon per year. By 2030, Vertex expects to deliver around 4GW of low carbon hydrogen, equivalent to 40 per cent of the UK government’s national target.