Jason Ford

SSE submits proposal for gas CCS project at Peterhead

News

Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) has submitted a proposal under the European Union’s (EU) NER300 funding mechanism to develop a carbon capture and storage (CCS) project at its gas-fired power station in Peterhead, Aberdeenshire.

Shell UK and CO2 DeepStore will also participate in the project by providing the offshore transport and storage elements of the proposal.

The project will design and develop a full-chain, post-combustion CCS facility capable of capturing the CO2 from one 385MW combined-cycle gas-turbine unit at Peterhead Power Station.

Current plans are that the CO2 will then be transported through an existing underground pipeline to St Fergus for further compression and then transported via an undersea pipeline to an existing gas reservoir in the North Sea operated by Shell UK that will have ceased production.

The project is sized to be able to participate in the EU’s NER300 and Department of Energy and Climate Change funding programmes, which are aimed at stimulating investment in CCS.

SSE said in July 2010 that it intended to prepare a project proposal for a post-combustion carbon-capture project for a gas-fired power station.

In November 2010 the UK government announced that the second phase of the £9bn CCS demonstration programme — the three projects that will follow the first demonstration — will be open to projects on gas-fired power plants, as well as coal-fired power plants.

‘I believe Peterhead represents the best site in the UK for a gas CCS project and our co-operation with Shell and Petrofac strengthens this proposition even further,’ said Ian Marchant, chief executive of SSE. ‘Given the work already undertaken, the project can proceed at a pace at least equal to other CCS projects in Europe. I hope that our submission will successfully persuade others that this is the case.’