Italian major Eni has welcomed the launch of the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s 'CCUS Vision' initiative to strengthen the carbon capture, usage and storage, which will fully compete on markets by 2035.
The scheme includes the launch of the Track-1 expansion process at HyNet and reaffirms the role of UK as one of the first and more active countries to promote CCUS as an essential lever for achieving its national decarbonisation targets, Eni said in a statement.
The initiative has committed £20 billion to helping the industry reach commercial scale and placed the country on a trajectory to store 20-30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually by 2030, while creating 50,000 new jobs.
In this framework Eni has established a leading position in the UK where is the CO2 transport and storage operator of the HyNet consortium, the statement noted.
The company is also 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, according to the statement.
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, said the statement.
HyNet is set to be among the world’s first low carbon clusters with a storage capacity of approximately 4.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year in the first phase with a further expansion to approximately 10 million annually, the statement added.
Eni has developed extensive expertise in storing gas in depleted fields over many decades. The company intends to use this know-how to repurpose some of its existing upstream assets into carbon dioxide storage hubs.
The repurposing will allow Eni to decarbonise its own and third parties' industrial activities "at a competitive cost and with fast time to market" through projects under development in the UK, Italy, in Libya. Other projects are being studied in the North Sea and Far East, the statement concluded.
