Essar Oil has awarded a contract for the development of the required basic engineering design package for a new EET Industrial Carbon Capture facility in Stanlow, UK.
The well-known tech provider MHI has been selected to deal with the carbon dioxide capture process section of the plant. This process will work through the captured carbon dioxide being permanently sequestered into the depleted gas fields which are under the sea in Liverpool Bay and form part of the HyNet cluster in the North West of England. The choice of MHI follows the completion of the pre-FEED phase for EET Industrial Carbon Capture, and the FEED phase of the project will begin in 2023.
The proposed construction of the EET Industrial Carbon Capture plant at the Stanlow Refinery, was announced by Essar in November 2022. Essar, who is participating in the Cluster of Sequencing Track One Expansion process, plans for the newly built facility to be operational in 2028. This will result in an estimated 860,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year being eliminated, which is about the same as removing 400,000 cars off the road, or more than 40% of all Stanlow emissions.
This demonstrates how important this plant is due to the benefits it will provide and it is also necessary to Essar’s overall decarbonisation strategy and it is also necessary to the company’s aim to become the UK’s first low carbon refinery. The company is currently investing $1.2 billion over the next five years, which will go towards lowering emissions by decarbonising their production processes. This process actively occurring places Essar at the front of the UK’s energy transition and secures the refinery’s vital role in the UK’s energy security and resilience drive.
Essar commented on its plans to achieve decarbonisation targets with a combination of incremental transformational projects, which will include energy efficiency and EET Industrial Carbon Capture. The company is also making significant investments into hydrogen and biofuels, via Essar Energy Transition (EET), and altogether through these projects the company is aiming to achieve a 75% in reduction in emissions by 2030 and be net zero by 2040.
The CEO of Essar Oil UK, Deepak Maheshwari, said, “With the selection of this key technology partner, we are ready to move into the next phase of EET Industrial Carbon Capture. This large-scale facility is an essential element of our overall ambition to become the UK’s first low carbon refinery, essentially future proofing this key industrial site, protecting jobs and ensuring we continue to play our vital role in the regional and national economy. MHI has the technology, expertise and proven experience to help us deliver this decarbonisation project and we look forward to working with them.”
Kenji Terasawa, the CEO and Head of Engineering Solutions at MHI, said, “Essar has huge ambitions to lead the overall decarbonisation of the North West. EET Industrial Carbon Capture at Stanlow is a significant project which will not only bring considerable benefits to the refinery, but will also make a material contribution to the UK’s overall net zero ambitions. We are delighted they have selected us to work with them – this is testament to our world leading carbon capture technology and our proven experience in delivering on large scale complex engineering projects.”