Eni strengthens position as UK’s leading CCS operator

Saturday, December 23 2023

General – CCUS Eni

Eni welcomed the launch of the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s (DESNZ) ‘CCUS Vision’ which will strengthen the carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) to be a competitive market by 2035.

This includes the launch of the Track-1 expansion process at HyNet.

This announcement reaffirms the role of UK as one of the first and most active countries to promote the CCS process as an essential lever for delivering its national decarbonisation targets and has committed £20 billion to helping the industry reach commercial scale.

This has placed the country on a trajectory to store 20-30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually by 2030, while creating 50,000 new jobs.

Whitin this framework Eni has established a leading position in the UK where is the CO2 transport and storage operator of the HyNet consortium. Moreover, the company is planning a second UK CCS hub, the Bacton Energy Hub, to decarbonise the Thames Estuary region where has been granted a license to store carbon dioxide in the depleted Hewett gas field in the Southern North Sea.

Together, HyNet and Bacton have the capacity to store 500 million tonnes of CO2 and will help to preserve thousands of jobs and encourage investment in new industrial supply chains, thus contributing to the creation of new employment opportunities as well as making a significant contribution to the UK’s decarbonisation objectives.

The timeline outlined by the UK ‘CCUS Vision’ aims to drive down costs for industry making it easier for hard-to-abate sectors to decarbonise their operations.

As part of its roadmap, the UK Government has announced the Track-1 expansion of the HyNet CCUS industrial cluster, calling businesses with CCUS projects to apply by 28 March 2024. At the end of this process, it is expected that between 1.3 and 1.5 additional million tonnes per year of CO2 will be added to the approximately 3.0 million tonnes secured by the 5 emitters already selected in the Track-1 thus allowing the full saturation of HyNet’s Phase 1 by 2030.