Net Zero Teesside Power (NZT Power), which aims to be one of the world’s first commercial scale gas-fired power stations with carbon capture, has received development consent from UK Government.
Development consent includes onshore CO2 gathering and transport infrastructure operated by the Northern Endurance Partnership (NEP).
NZT Power, which aims to take a final investment decision in September 2024 or before, could generate up to 860 megawatts of low carbon electricity.
The planned Net Zero Teesside Power project, which aims to be one of the world’s first commercial scale gas-fired power stations with carbon capture, took another step forward after receiving development consent from the Secretary of State for Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) following a recommendation from the Planning Inspectorate (PINS).
Consent was granted following a joint application between NZT Power and the Northern Endurance Partnership. NZT Power is a combined-cycle gas turbine electricity generating station with an abated capacity of up to 860 megawatts output with carbon dioxide (CO2) capture plant. The NEP project includes a CO2 gathering network on Teesside to transport captured CO2 from industrial emitters; a CO2 gathering/booster station to receive the captured CO2 from the gathering network and from NZT Power; and the onshore section of a CO2 transport pipeline for the onward transport of the captured Net CO2 to the offshore Endurance store.
The granting of development consent, following several stages of consultation, comes after NZT Power was named on the Track 1 Negotiations Project List by DESNZ as part of Phase 2 of the Cluster Sequencing process for Carbon Capture Usage and Storage (CCUS). The project is now conducting negotiations for support through the relevant Business Models to enable a final investment decision in September 2024 or before.
NZT Power, a joint venture between bp and Equinor, could generate up to 860 megawatts of flexible, dispatchable low-carbon power equivalent to the electricity requirements of around 1.3 million UK homes. Up to 2 million tonnes of CO2 per year will be captured at the plant, and then transported and securely stored by the NEP in subsea storage sites in the North Sea.
NEP – a joint venture between bp, Equinor, and TotalEnergies – is the CO2 transportation and storage provider for the East Coast Cluster (ECC). The Teesside onshore NEP infrastructure will serve the Teesside-based carbon capture projects – NZT Power, H2Teesside and Teesside Hydrogen CO2 Capture – that were selected for first connection to the ECC by DESNZ in March 2023 as part of the UK’s cluster sequencing process for carbon capture usage and storage (CCUS). Around 4 million tonnes of CO2 per year from these projects will be transported and stored from 2027.