Mitsubishi awarded pre-feed contract for carbon capture plant

Padeswood cement plant (Photo: Hanson UK)

Hanson UK has awarded Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Engineering (MHIENG) a contract for a preliminary front-end engineering design (pre-FEED) for a CO2 capture plant at its Padeswood cement works facility in Flintshire, Wales.

The newly awarded pre-FEED represents MHIENG’s third project involving CO2 capture at a cement plant, following a carbon capture and storage (CCS) feasibility study for Lehigh Cement Company in Alberta, Canada, and a CO2 capture demonstration testing program currently underway for Tokuyama Corporation in Japan.

The project is part of a comprehensive effort to decarbonize the UK’s cement industry. This plan constitutes the UK-based cement industry’s first adoption of CCS technology.

This pre-FEED is part of a project that will deliver a CO2 capture plant to the Padeswood Works. Once operational, the plant will capture 800,000 tonnes of CO2 per year and the plan is to store it in spent gas fields off the coast of North West England.

MHIENG will support the project by carrying out the Pre-FEED of a CO2 capture plant applying its “Advanced KM CDR Process,” CO2 capture technology jointly developed with The Kansai Electric Power Co.

The UK Government has set ambitious targets for achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050. To achieve this goal, it has been building the necessary infrastructure, including CCUS clusters that encompass all aspects of carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) for implementation at designated industrial zones.

In October 2021 HyNet and East Coast Clusters were selected as the Track 1 CCUS clusters by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). This project was subsequently shortlisted in August 2022 for potential funding when it was selected among a total of twenty CCUS and CCUS-enabled hydrogen projects chosen by BEIS to advance to the due diligence phase of its Track 1 Phase 2 cluster sequencing programme. Operational commencement of the CO2 capture plant at the Padeswood Works is targeted for 2027.

MHIENG promotes the adoption of CO2 capture technologies in diverse industrial applications globally: not only in conventional thermal power plants and chemical plants, but also in biomass power plants, steel mills, waste to energy plants, gas engines, ships, and amongst other applications, the company said.

Hanson UK is the UK group subsidiary of Heidelberg Materials, one of the largest building materials manufacturers in the world based in Heidelberg, Germany.