Essar Oil to build £360 million carbon capture facility to fulfill its ambition to become UK’s leading low carbon refinery
A key factor in carbon reduction will be the construction of a £360 million CO2 capture plant, which will begin in the first quarter of 2025 and be completed in 2027.
Stanlaw, November 30, 2022: Essar Oil UK Limited (“Essar” or the “Company”) today announced plans to build a new £360 million carbon capture plant at its Stanlaw refinery, a leading low-carbon refinery by 2030. is consistent with its ambition to become
Essar is investing more than £1 billion in its various energy-efficient, fuel-switching and carbon capture initiatives, enabling it to significantly decarbonise its manufacturing processes by 2030 and leading Essar to lead Britain to lower carbon emissions.
Essar’s energy transformation strategy is based on five principles: operating key stainless steel refining processes as efficiently and safely as possible; decarbonizing Stanley’s operations; the presentation of Vertex Hydrogen (“Vertex”) and building a hydrogenated future as a core part of the Hynet consortium; development of green fuels (including sustainable aviation fuels); and the installation of Britain’s largest biofuel storage facility by Stanley Terminals Limited.
Essar will achieve its decarbonisation targets through a combination of internal (energy efficiency and performance improvements) and transformational projects, including a 360 million pound carbon capture plant announced today, but significant investments have resulted in Essar leading the way towards hydrogen and biofuels.
Kent plc has been awarded a pre-feed engineering contract to develop a facility to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted from one of Europe’s largest full-residue fluidized catalytic cracking units, located at the Stanlaw refinery. The gas will be permanently isolated in a depleted gas field under the sea in Liverpool Bay as part of the Hynet cluster structure in the north west of England.
Once completed in 2027, the plant will remove approximately 0.81 million tonnes of CO2 per year – the equivalent of the carbon dioxide emitted by 400,000 cars on the road, removing around 40 per cent of all of Stanlow’s emissions. The project was selected by BEIS as a Phase-2 winner in the CCUS cluster sequencing process earlier this summer and thus is now progressing through the appropriate phase.
Deepak Maheshwari, CEO, Essar Oil UK, said: “This new carbon capture plant is the largest initiative to decarbonise our processes and is a key aspect of our very ambitious decarbonisation strategy. Our aspiration is to be a leading low carbon refinery.
This is a huge undertaking, but it is a journey we are fully committed to. As well as being environmentally sound, it is also a testament to the strong future of this important Stanlow refinery in the long term, which will protect jobs and industry and place Stanlow at the heart of Britain’s energy transition.”
Essar has made rapid progress towards achieving its broad decarbonisation targets. In September EOUK announced that the company had entered into a ‘heads of terms’ agreement with Vertex, a joint venture with Progressive Energy, for the supply of 280MW+ of hydrogen.
The use of hydrogen will help in the decarbonisation of Essar’s existing production facilities, including a new hydrogen-powered furnace.[1] included, which was delivered in August this year. The £45 million furnace is the first of its kind in Britain, 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 production center in the UK as part of the Hynet cluster (www.hynet.co.uk). This will produce 1GW of hydrogen (equivalent to the energy consumption of a city as large as Liverpool, Britain) and capture 1.8 million carbons per year. Vertex is expected to have around 4GW of low carbon hydrogen by 2030, equivalent to 40 per cent of the UK government’s national target.