Powering Up Britain

There’s a statistic that continues to concern me. While within Wood we’ve delivered 175 global carbon capture projects that add up to gigatons of carbon capture, we’re currently only capturing around 40 million tons across the globe. Urgent action is therefore required to scale up our decarbonisation efforts to meet key net-zero targets.

That’s why the UK’s ‘Powering Up Britain’ plan is so critical. While focused on measures that aim to secure affordable homegrown energy, it also looks to accelerate the energy transition through carbon capture clusters in industrial heartlands, strategic hydrogen production projects, and mobilisation of much needed investment through the Green Finance Strategy – largely in response to the US’s Inflation Reduction Act.

The announcement also provides much needed clarity on the UK’s regulatory frameworks for key technologies such as hydrogen and carbon capture and storage (CCS) and sets a foundation for decarbonisation to meet the UK’s 2030 and 2035 CCS ambition, albeit with more work to do in the coming months to realise those ambitious targets. I'm equally pleased to see that within the broad range of projects that will benefit from the government’s plan, our teams within Wood are working on several of them with our clients.

Carbon capture

Wood has been involved in the development and deployment of carbon capture projects in the UK since the early 2000s, having delivered the early stages of the DF-1 Peterhead power station project. Since then, we’ve supported the development of many asset decarbonisation projects within the UK including with bp on the Net Zero Teesside project. Here, we completed the development of the industrial cluster masterplan, and continue to support via our integrated project management team.

Fast and furious action

I look forward to additional recommendations by the UK Government later this year that will enable further industrial decarbonisation clusters such as the Acorn project in Scotland where Wood completed front end engineering design, or Humber Zero which will contribute significantly towards decarbonisation of the Humberside region.

What we need is fast and furious action to get us to a low carbon economy and ‘Powering up Britain’ brought us one step closer.