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Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage (CCUS) Innovation 2.0 competition: Call 1 successful projects

Updated 28 June 2023

Electrified Subsea System for offshore CO₂ storage

Led by Baker Hughes - £2,122,698.59

This project is an experimental research & development to technically qualify an electrified subsea system with simplified structures and flexible pipe to enable largescale offshore CO₂ storage in CCUS projects. Subsea technology is already being used today in projects for the oil & gas industry and will be required for the UK to store enough CO₂ to reach its decarbonisation goals. This program will enable a lower cost, better performing generation of subsea equipment to improve the economics of CCUS projects and enable projects that would not be possible with traditional subsea technology.

Parametric testing of Novel Non-Aqueous Solvent technology with Rotating Packed Beds

Led by Carbon Clean Solutions Ltd in partnership with The University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Doosan Babcock Ltd - £607,126.57

Carbon Clean, Newcastle University’s School of Engineering (NU), and Doosan Babcock (DB) will test the use of rotating packed beds (RPB) process equipment technology and Non-Aqueous Solvent (NAS) technology for point source industrial carbon capture applications. As with conventional carbon capture, CO₂ will be captured from a flue gas using a solvent (absorption step), and the solvent is then recovered and recycled and a pure CO₂ stream is produced (stripping step). However, the use of RPBs and NAS are expected to deliver considerable cost and space advantages over conventional technologies. RPBs have been validated at the bench-scale and pilot-scale, demonstrating a nine times size reduction in absorber and stripper columns. NAS has been validated from pilot-scale to demonstration-scale and illustrates significant energy reductions.

XLR8 CCS Accelerating the deployment of a low cost carbon capture solution for hard to abate industries

Led by C-Capture Ltd in partnership with Wood Group UK Limited, Castle Cement Limited, Glass Futures Ltd and Energy Works (Hull) Limited - £1,723,101.02

C-Capture designs world-leading chemical processes for the capture of carbon dioxide (CO₂). We have developed a post-combustion capture technology that is environmentally benign; extremely robust and suitable for use even within challenging, hard-to-abate industries; and that uses significantly less energy than current commercially available technologies.

Our proposed project will assess the feasibility of deploying C-Capture’s innovative technology within three industries that are essential to the economy but are also major CO₂ contributors: cement, waste to energy (WtE) and glass. These industries produce emissions that are challenging to decarbonise due to the level and type of impurities in the flue gas.

The project will trial and assess the compatibility of C-Capture’s solvent with real-world flue gas in the cement, WtE and glass industries. Three feasibility studies will be carried out with identified host sites, and carbon capture solvent compatibility units (CCSCUs) will be deployed across six different sites within these industries across the period of the project.

Deep Blue C

Deep Branch Biotechnology Ltd in partnership with Centre For Process Innovation Limited - £4,827,394.93

Deep Branch, one of the UK’s fastest-growing biotechnology scale-ups, has developed Proton™, a radically more sustainable alternative to conventional protein sources for the animal feed industry. The commercialisation of the single-cell protein will tackle the climate emergency and reduce the food industry’s impact on biodiversity loss, as the ingredient has no arable land requirements. In this project, Deep Branch will collaborate with CPI (the Centre for Process Innovation), the UK’s leading technology innovation centre, to significantly reduce the cost of deployment by improving input utilisation and process efficiency. This project culminates in a pre-FEED design for a commercial plant utilising >100 tonnes of carbon dioxide per day.

Turning waste carbon dioxide into value for the surfactants industry

Led by Econic Technologies Ltd in partnership with Unilever plc- £1,000,000.00

There is increasing imperative and demand for fast moving consumer goods, like household cleaning products, to be made sustainably, at price. Econic offers an innovative solution for surfactants producers, an integral component of cleaning products, to utilise captured waste carbon dioxide as a raw material in their production processes. The use of Econic’s catalyst and process technology in the production of non-ionic surfactants allows captured waste CO₂ to replace up to 40 wt% of traditional fossil fuel based and palm oil derived raw materials in a process that can be retrofitted onto existing production plants.

StrataTrapper: Commercialising breakthrough research on accurate reservoir simulation for subsurface CO₂ storage

Led Imperial College London in partnership with University of Cambridge, OpenGoSim Ltd, BP International plc, Storegga Limited and Drax Group plc - £959,662.00

Reservoir simulations of injected CO₂ plumes are central to the successful engineering and management of CO₂ storage. Plume migration rates and direction determine the storage efficiency and significance of potential leakage pathways. The extent of residual and dissolution trapping are quantified through simulation-based history matching. Increasing simulation accuracy can de-risk and lower costs throughout the lifetime of a storage project.

In StrataTrapper we translate cutting edge research on the geological fluid dynamics and trapping of CO₂ into innovative characterisation and modelling software tools that will be used by industry to reduce risks and costs of CO₂ storage projects. The tools will be commercialised through incorporation into the CO₂ reservoir simulation platform OpenGoSim, in addition to being made opensource. We will demonstrate the applicability of these tools to the Endurance field in the Southern North Sea and the East Mey Site in the Central and Northern North Sea. The result of the work will be the commercialisation of the StrataTrapper reservoir simulation tools for the rapid screening, risking, project design, and management of CO₂ storage

BioReact Carbon Formate - Continuous Capture of Industrial CO₂ and its Utilisation as a Platform Chemical Feedstock

Led by Ingenza Ltd in partnership with Johnson Matthey Ltd - £443,632.88

An Ingenza and Johnson Matthey collaboration is seeking to develop a novel CO₂ conversion technology to abate industrial CO₂ emission and access negative carbon commodity chemical, formate. This collaboration builds on previous successes in feedstock hydrogen and CO₂ conversion to formate in batch mode operation.

Ingenza is a world leader in Industrial Biotechnology and will implement its capability to develop a bespoke engineered biocatalyst that enables industrial CO₂ emission to be hydrogenated into formate. Johnson Matthey’s chemical engineering and process flow expertise will enable implementation of the biocatalyst in a cost competitive and scalable operational format for continuous CO₂ utilisation and formate manufacturing.

The formate product provides a value-added proposition to assimilate industrially emitted CO₂ into a saleable, versatile commodity chemical which is used across of variety of chemical, pharma, material, agricultural and household product sectors. Existing supply of formate incurs a positive carbon footprint, whereas our drop-in replacement will have a negative-carbon footprint.

FOCUSS - Flexibly-Operated Capture using Solvent Storage

Led by Keadby Generation Ltd in partnership with AECOM Ltd and The University of Sheffield - £515,878.00

High CO₂ capture levels of 95-99% from carbon capture plants are needed to adequately decarbonise thermal power plants to meet net zero targets. This is even more challenging when the capture system has to be flexible and respond to the electricity system by frequent start-up, shutdown and load ramping as is the case for thermal plants operating with fluctuating renewable electricity generation.

The FOCUSS project’s primary objective is to accelerate the time to market for widely-applicable and cost effective technology to enable post-combustion capture plants to achieve 95-99% CO₂ capture levels at all times, including during start-up, shutdown and other transients. The project will develop advanced models to inform a test campaign to be undertaken at the University of Sheffield’s Translational Energy Research Centre Amine Capture Plant, where the novel use of solvent storage will be demonstrated.

Process engineers from AECOM will take these findings to lead the production of a suite of open source industry guidance documents to aid the designers and developers of gas-fired power plants with carbon capture. The project benefits from a cooperation with complementary research work being undertaken by International Test Centre Network colleagues from the National Carbon Capture Centre in the USA.