01-12-2022

Essar Oil UK to build £360 million carbon capture facility to deliver on its ambition to be a leading low carbon refinery

Essar Oil UK Limited (“Essar” or “the Company”) today announces its plan to build a £360 million major new carbon capture plant at its Stanlow refinery in line with its ambition to become a leading low carbon refinery by 2030.

Essar is investing over £1 billion into a range of energy efficiency, fuel-switching, and carbon capture initiatives, designed to decarbonise its production processes significantly by 2030 and put Essar at the forefront of the UK’s shift to low carbon energy.

Essar’s energy transition strategy is based on five principles: running the core Stanlow refining processes as efficiently and safely as possible; decarbonising Stanlow’s operations; building a hydrogen future through the launch of Vertex Hydrogen (“Vertex”) and as a key part of the HyNet consortium; developing green fuels (including Sustainable Aviation Fuels); and establishing the UK’s largest biofuels storage facility through Stanlow Terminals Limited.

Essar will achieve its decarbonisation targets through a combination of incremental (energy efficiency and operating improvements) and transformational projects, including the £360 million carbon capture plant announced today, but also as a result of the significant investments Essar is making into hydrogen and biofuels.

Kent plc has been awarded a pre-FEED engineering contract to develop the facility that will take the CO2 emitted from one of Europe’s largest full-Residue Fluidised Catalytic Cracking units, located at the Stanlow refinery.  The gas will be permanently sequestered into depleted gas fields under the sea in Liverpool Bay, as part of the HyNet cluster infrastructure in the North West of England.

Once complete in 2027, the plant will eliminate an estimated 0.81 million tons of CO2 per year — the equivalent of taking 400,000 cars off the road, eliminating nearly 40% of all Stanlow emissions.  The project has been selected by BEIS as a Phase-2 winner in the CCUS cluster sequencing process earlier this summer, and as such, is currently progressing through the due diligence stage.