United Kingdom – Essar Oil UK intends to invest £360 million in a major new carbon capture plant at its Stanlow refinery in order to become a leading low-carbon refinery by 2030.
After it is finished in 2027, the facility will remove an estimated 0.81 million tons of CO2 annually, which is the same as removing 400,000 automobiles from the road and removing almost 40% of all Stanlow emissions.
Essar is investing more than £1 billion in a variety of energy efficiency, fuel-switching, and carbon capture projects with the goal of drastically reducing the carbon footprint of its manufacturing processes by 2030.
Essar’s decarbonization goals will be met through a combination of incremental (energy efficiency and operational improvements) and transformative projects, such as the £360 million carbon capture plant, as well as the large investments Essar is making in hydrogen and biofuels.
FEED contract
The facility that will receive the CO2 released by one of Europe’s largest full-Residue Fluidized Catalytic Cracking units, located at the Stanlow refinery, has been given to Kent under a pre-FEED engineering contract. As part of the HyNet cluster infrastructure in the North West of England, the gas will be permanently buried in exhausted gas fields under the sea in Liverpool Bay.
The project is currently moving through the due diligence stage after being chosen by BEIS as a Phase-2 winner in the CCUS cluster sequencing competition earlier this summer.
