Huge boost for ground-breaking Carbon Capture project at Immingham

• £25m pledged to develop Carbon Capture and Storage technology
• Creates 2,500 construction jobs, 200 permanent jobs, and safeguards 20,000 jobs in region

Humber Zero, a project to decarbonise critical energy intensive industry and safeguard local jobs in the wider Humber region, has today secured £25 million, £12.5 million of which is government funding.

Backed by Vitol’s VPI Immingham power plant and the Phillips 66 Humber Refinery, Humber Zero is a carbon capture and storage (CCS) project on the south bank of the Humber Estuary.

The large-scale decarbonisation project will remove up to 8-million tonnes per annum of CO2 at the Immingham industrial site within the next 7 years. This represents a meaningful reduction in national CO2 emissions, while protecting local jobs and supporting the region’s economy.

Of the £25 million initially being invested into the project, VPI and Phillips 66 are investing £12.5 million and Innovate UK, the UK Government’s innovation agency, is matching that figure. The initial £25 million will be used to develop the technology to capture and safely store carbon created by the Immingham industrial cluster.

In a further phase, the project aims to produce hydrogen at commercial scale allowing fuel switching, from natural gas to hydrogen, to fully decarbonise the Immingham industrial site.

The project will create 2,500 jobs during construction, 200 permanent jobs, and safeguards 20,000 direct and indirect jobs on the South Bank.

• A cluster of energy-intensive industries lies 1km from the coast, on the south bank of the Humber river. They include the Phillips 66 Humber Refinery and nearby combined heat and power plant VPI-Immingham, partners behind Humber Zero.
• Close to offshore gas storage fields the cluster sits along a key pipeline route, identified by National Grid, to connect and decarbonise other industries on the Humber’s south bank.
• Energy intensive industries account for over 20% of the local economy and one in 10 jobs.
• The project intends to create sufficient hydrogen to power over a million homes.
• Phillips 66 Humber Refinery is a global leader in the manufacture of premium grade graphite coke for electrical vehicle batteries, a UK leader in biofuels and constitutes around 20% of the UK’s refining capacity.
• VPI-Immingham is one of the largest combined heat and power plants in Europe, capable of generating 1,240MW – about 2.5% of UK peak electricity demand and up to 930 tonnes of steam per hour. Heat and power are used by nearby refineries to produce transportation products for use in the UK and internationally.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is one of the components of the 10-point plan for the Government’s Green Industrial Revolution, announced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson in November 2020, and is critical to the UK achieving its legislated goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The Government has set a target to remove 10-million tonnes of the UK’s annual CO2 emissions by 2030, a figure equivalent to all industrial emissions from the Humber.