Scotland's Acorn CCS project secures another customer

The developers planning a 700-MW blue hydrogen plant in southeast England have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to use the Acorn capture capture and storage (CCS) project to store emissions from the facility, they said on October 12.

Project Cavendish, a joint venture between Arup, VPI, National Grid Ventures, Shell, SSE Thermal and Uniper, aim to bring their blue hydrogen plant online in 2027. It will be situated on the Isle of Grain in the Thames Estuary, where an LNG import terminal is already located.

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Under the MoU, CO₂ resulting from the blue hydrogen production process would be captured and delivered by ship to Peterhead in Scotland, where it would be transferred to the Acorn project, a joint venture between Storegga, Shell and Harbour Energy.

Acorn's developers have also signed MoUs to handle CO₂ from the SEGAL and FUKA gas terminals in St Fergus, Scotland, the Peterhead carbon capture power plant being developed by Equinor and SSE Thermal, and the Grangemouth oil refining and petrochemicals complex run by Ineos.

Acorn's developers are bidding for inclusion in a government support programme to decarbonise the UK's largest industrial clusters. The government said in August it had shortlisted five CCS projects for the programme's first phase, but only two can be selected. Acorn is one of the more advanced CCS projects underway in the UK, having already entered its frontend engineering and design phase.

The Acorn partners have also looked at building their own blue hydrogen facility, using gas that is brought ashore from the North Sea as their feedstock.