The UK Petroleum Industry Association (UKPIA) welcomes the announcement yesterday (18th February) that the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has awarded £13 million towards funding for hydrogen projects involving the Essar Stanlow Refinery in Ellesmere Port.
The funding given to the HyNet consortium, of which Essar Oil UK is a member, includes plans to develop a Low Carbon Hydrogen Plant at Stanlow Refinery, which will produce 3TWh of low carbon hydrogen whilst also pioneering carbon capture storage (CCS) technology to capture and store over 95% of carbon used in the process. The funding will also support a front-end engineering design (FEED) study for a new hydrogen-fired combined heat and power (CHP) at Stanlow.
UKPIA Director-General Stephen Marcos Jones, said, “The HyNet project is one of the most ambitious low-carbon industrial cluster initiatives in Europe. Today’s announcement demonstrates how critical Essar’s Stanlow Refinery is to the success of these efforts to decarbonise the economy of the North West, as well as showing more broadly how the downstream oil sector is vital to the UK’s ambitions to reach ‘Net Zero’ emissions by 2050, as outlined in UKPIA’s Future Vision report[1]. Downstream oil companies have the experience, engineering expertise and business acumen necessary to make the transition to a low-carbon future a reality for the benefit of both industry and wider society.”
ENDS
Notes for editors:
- The UK Petroleum Industry Association (UKPIA) represents eight oil refining and marketing companies that operate the six major oil refineries in the UK and source over 85% of the transport fuels used. UKPIA members also own around 1,250 of the UK's 8,476 filling stations in the UK.
- [1] UKPIA Future Vision Report: https://www.fuelsindustryuk.org/media/1wbnicao/ukpia-vision-july-2019-2.pdf