Characterisation of UK Industrial Clusters and Techno-Economic Cost Assessment for Carbon Dioxide Transport and Storage Implementation

The UK Government and British industries are making important efforts for the development and implementation of carbon capture, transport and storage (CCTS). Critical to this will be an understanding of the composition and characteristics of the industrial clusters and of the costs for the CCTS systems. However, the available literature presents a wide range of cost values and many of the studies do not tend to consider all of the carbon transport and storage elements together. Moreover, there are a very limited number of UK specific analyses and in some cases the studies are considered to be too historical. In this paper, we present a review and characterisation of the main UK industrial clusters, in terms of geographical limits, available infrastructure, industries present and level of emissions. We then provide a brief review of carbon transport and storage (T&S) cost models and costing information before conducting a technoeconomic assessment of the potential T&S system costs for the UK industrial clusters. To the best of our knowledge, this integrated analysis has not been conducted for the UK context, and this is key for policy development and to assess the wider economic impacts of CCTS. From our cluster characterisation and techno-economic analysis, we found that there is important potential for CCTS for industrial decarbonisation in the UK. Also, the creation of a CO2 shipping industry will allow for industrial clusters that do not have an adequate storage sites nearby to use the CCTS infrastructure in other sites. The development of a CO2 shipping infrastructure also enables carbon management and storage services to be exported to polluters overseas, potentially creating and maintaining jobs and economic growth. We believe that the cluster characterisation and cost estimates produced here provide valuable insight to inform policy and can be used as a first step for to develop further analysis in policy relevant areas such as an analysis of the wider economic impacts of these investments, the effect on jobs and competitiveness and the impact on the wider society.