Essar Building Carbon Capture Plant at U.K.'s Stanlow Refinery

Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland)--Essar Oil U.K. is pushing ahead to decarbonise its major U.K. refinery at Stanlow with a commitment to building a £360 million (US$442 million) carbon capture plant on-site.

The company has signed an engineering contract to develop the facility to Kent plc, which will capture the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted from what Essar called "one of Europe's largest full-Residue Fluidised Catalytic Cracking units," before transporting it for permanent sequestration in depleted gas fields under the sea in Liverpool Bay. It forms a key part of the HyNet North West project, one of the U.K.'s largest industrial decarbonisation projects which, during the summer, was among a number of clean hydrogen (H2) and carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) projects chosen by the U.K. government to advance to the next stage of its national "green industrial revolution" plan. For additional information, see August 22, 2022, article - U.K. Shortlists Hydrogen and Carbon Capture Projects.

Once commissioned in 2027, the CCS plant will eliminate nearly 40% of all Stanlow emissions, by capturing an estimated 810,000 tonnes of CO2 per year--the equivalent of taking 400,000 cars off the road. The project forms part of Essar's £1 billion investment into a range of energy efficiency, fuel-switching, and carbon capture initiatives, designed to decarbonise its production processes significantly by 2030. Stanlow refinery is located near Ellesmere port in Cheshire England and supplies 16% of the country's road transport fuels.

"This new carbon capture plant is the single biggest initiative to decarbonise our processes and a core element to our hugely ambitious decarbonisation strategy," said Deepak Maheshwari, chief executive officer of Essar Oil U.K.. "Our ambition is to become a leading low carbon refinery. This is a massive undertaking, but it is a journey we are fully committed to. 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 also placing Stanlow at the very center of the UK's energy transition."

In addition to the CCS plant, Essar, through its joint venture company Vertex Hydrogen, is building a low-carbon (blue hydrogen) facility at Stanlow that will sit at the center of the HyNet cluster to produce a total of 1 gigawatt per year of hydrogen, across two units, from 2026. Waste-fuel gasses at Stanlow, and natural gas, will be converted by Vertex into hydrogen. In August, Essar took delivery of a new hydrogen-powered furnace at Stanlow, the first in the U.K. to be 100% powered by hydrogen. The £45 million (US$55 million) furnace, which stands 18.5 meters tall, 26.5 meters long and 14.2 meters wide, will replace three existing furnaces at Stanlow and reduce CO2 emissions by more than 240,000 tonnes each year from 2026.

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