Characterisation of Industrial Clusters in the UK and Techno-Economic Cost Assessment for CCTS Implementation

Following the recommendations of the UK Climate Change Committee (CCC) for the 6th Carbon Budget, the UK Government has set up a new target cutting emissions by 78% by 2035 compared to 1990 levels. In addition to this, and as a part of its COVID recovery plans, the UK Government has presented a 10-point plan for a green industrial revolution, describing investments and developments across different sectors of the economy. One key point of this plan is investing in carbon capture, usage and storage, linked to the industrial decarbonisation challenge launched by the UK Government, providing up to £170 million, matched by £261 million from industry, for the development of decarbonisation technologies such as carbon capture and storage and hydrogen fuel switching. The technologies will be deployed and scaled up within the six largest industrial clusters in the UK.

All these recent policy developments suggest that there will be important efforts in the UK for the implementation of carbon capture, transport and storage (CCTS). However, there is a lack of detailed UK cluster definitions in the literature. Looking at the CCTS technology literature more widely, there is a considerable number of different cost models for these technologies. However, the available literature presents a wide range of cost values, the studies do not tend to consider all CCTS elements together (onshore, offshore transport networks, shipping and storage), in some cases the studies are too old, and there are very limited number of UK specific analyses.

In this paper, we present a review and a detailed characterisation of the main UK industrial clusters. Also, we provide a brief review CCTS cost models and a techno-economic assessment of the characterised UK industrial clusters. To the best of our knowledge, this has not been done yet for the UK context, and such analysis is key for policy analysis and further research.