Hurdle cleared for £1.5bn Teesside power plant

A development consent order has been secured for the Net Zero Teesside Power project, which aims to be one of the world’s first commercial-scale gas-fired power stations with carbon capture, usage and storage.

Claire Coutinho, secretary of state for energy security and net zero (DESNZ) gave the thumbs-up following a recommendation from the Planning Inspectorate.

Consent was granted following a joint application between NZT Power and the Northern Endurance Partnership.

NZT Power is a joint venture between BP and Equinor, The Northern Endurance Partnership is a partnership between those two parties and TotalEnergies.

Aecom is advising.

The power station is intended as 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 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, follows the project being 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 by September 2024.

NEP is the CO2 transportation and storage provider for the East Coast Cluster. 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. Around 4m tonnes of CO2 per year from these projects could be transported and stored from 2027.

Ian Hunter, managing director, NZT Power, said: “The granting of a Development Consent Order is an important step towards the development of the UK’s first full-scale integrated power and carbon capture project.

“We thank the planning inspectorate and the Secretary of State for their work during this process and look forward to taking the project forward to a planned final investment decision in September 2024 or before”.

Louise Kingham, BP’s UK head of country and senior vice president, Europe, said: “Receiving development consent is another major milestone for NZT Power.

“This first-of-a-kind project has the potential to deliver low-carbon flexible power equivalent to the electricity requirements of around 1.3m UK homes and can help secure Teesside’s position at the heart of the country’s energy transition.

“These moments bring us closer to our goal of supporting the UK government’s commitment to fully decarbonize the power system in the UK by 2035 and will help to enable greater deployment of renewable power by providing flexible, dispatchable low-carbon electricity.”