Richard Gwilliam is the UK BECCS programme director at Drax Group, responsible for overseeing the conversion of its main asset – the largest power station in the UK – into what will become the world’s largest engineered carbon-removals project. Gwilliam also chairs the Humber Energy Board, established in 2022 to bring private sector businesses and public sector organisations together to shape energy strategy and decarbonisation opportunities in the Humber.
To this end, the Energy Board published a document entitled The Humber: A 2030 Vision for Industrial Decarbonisation, which set out the scale of the opportunity and how the UK can decarbonise such a vital geography in a more strategic way. Energy Voice spoke to Gwilliam to discuss exactly what it will take to decarbonise the UK’s most-polluting industrial region.
Energy Voice: How would you define the significance of the Humber, and the Humber Industrial Cluster Plan (HICP), in the context of UK energy?
Richard Gwilliam: The Humber is to energy what the City of London is to finance – 20% of all the power that we consume in the UK is generated within this geography, we have two major refineries that produce a third of all the refinery products and a fifth of all the gas that we import through pipelines also makes landfall in the Humber. But there’s a consequence of that critical role from energy security and innovation – more CO2 is emitted in the Humber Industrial Cluster than all of the other industrial clusters put together.
The Energy Board, which I chair, champions the region. It is genuinely cross sector, it brings all the industry in the public sector together, but it’s there to act as a leader and an advocate to promote decarbonisation in the Humber via the HICP, which was a piece of work that was co-funded between government and industry to answer the question: how do you create a long-term plan to decarbonise this vital asset?
The Energy Board has started to resonate with people as a conduit for this message, and we’re trying to simplify the narrative. This is a really big geography that has strategic importance, and because of its size it may have been perceived as being too difficult to decarbonise.
Most recently we’ve been communicating the importance of getting a carbon capture network built. This is a pipeline that will run through the region and allow all of these major industrial processes and power stations to capture their CO2 emissions and send them under the North Sea. This is a transformational opportunity for the UK, both for energy security and decarbonisation.
In terms of not having told the story in quite the right way, or perhaps as convincingly as it needed to be, is there any particular element that you think has been missing from the narrative?
The Humber has been historically defined as a divided area because we have this huge estuary that runs through the middle. But people don’t often realise that the economic success of the Humber is directly linked to the rise and fall of the tide.
We have four principal ports in the area, all of which have a really important role for the energy economy. At Immingham you have the single biggest container port by tonnage of anywhere in the country. More material comes through this industrial corridor along the estuary than anywhere else in in the UK.
“The Humber” is also quite a politically motivated phrase, because we’ve seen successive changes in local authority boundaries that have divided or brought the region together. But we actually have four local authorities either side of the estuary that work really closely together.
They have started to recognise the functional economic geography that is the Humber and we’ve been able to leverage off that with the energy industry to ensure that this is seen as a coherent, interconnected network. For example, we bring the majority of the biomass that helps fuel the UK in via Immingham port.
If you head west to east across the cluster you’ve got the largest power station in the UK, then you’ve got one of the largest onshore wind farms in the UK. Then you’ve got one of the newest CCGT power stations in Europe. They’ve got plans to apply carbon capture equipment to a new iteration of that.
You’ve got the UK’s largest prospective storage site for hydrogen and then you’ve got access to the North Sea, which is the critical enabler for how you decarbonise this region, where you have more licensed sites for storing CO2 off the Yorkshire/Lincolnshire coast.
It’s a happy coincidence that you’ve got the biggest concentration of capture projects in the country in one region.
As I highlighted earlier, what we need in the Humber is a single pipeline that joins these things together and by connecting these projects with buried infrastructure, which in the grand scheme of things is largely inexpensive, you have this really coherent way in which you can articulate the benefits of this region.
That’s what we’re trying to promote from the Humber and create a much stronger sense that this is not only a functional economic geography, but a connected region that can work together to decarbonise our assets.
When will be the next big opportunity to realise the HICP? What needs to happen?
To answer that question, we need to look back at recent history. When the government came to announcing where it wanted to focus CCS investment, they focused entirely on the northwest and Teesside. So that came as a bit of a surprise to the Humber region – given the scale of the opportunity here.
We were told in an industry update in December last year that the government would launch the process for track one expansion and track two early this year, but we’re still effectively on hiatus, waiting for what will now be the new administration to press “go” on subsequent rounds of competition.
The frustration has been that the competitions government has run for CCS in the past have been very much a winner-takes-all approach. So Teesside – great success – they’re rolling forward; HyNet – great success – they’re rolling forward, but we’re still left with uncertainty in the Humber.
My key concern is that the longer this uncertainty persists, the less likely it is that investment will come to fruition.
Through the Energy Board, we calculated that at least £15 billion of private sector capital was due to flow into this region before the end of the decade, to bring some of these decarbonisation projects online. And you can’t forget that the boardrooms of the major industrial players and power generators in the Humber are often based internationally.
So when you’ve got a boardroom in California that is perceiving the Humber’s had a delay and they’ve got to make investment decisions against their portfolio of international assets they may begin to think about allocating their capital elsewhere.
This is a really important site for keeping the lights on in the UK and keeping the UK fuelled. It’s not just the investment, we’ve again calculated it through the HEB that the provision of the pipeline, the decarbonisation of these assets will create at least 42,000 jobs.
These are jobs in critical forms of employment for our industrial heartlands. We’ve got the skills, we’ve got the expertise, we’ve got the growth opportunities in the Humber and there’s a potential risk that if this message doesn’t resonate, if the pipeline isn’t constructed, if the attention isn’t given from the government to the Humber, those roles could go elsewhere.
So for the new Labour government, which has put growth at the heart of its agenda, the priority has to be to set out a clearer industrial strategy that gives businesses confidence that the opportunity to deploy this form of vital technology will happen in the region. Because if it doesn’t happen here, it’s hard to see how the country reaches net zero.
The government needs to take another look at this region – it needs to prioritise a critical geography for keeping the lights on and make sure that £15 billion of private sector investment isn’t spent in Houston or Hamburg instead.
Could you expand on progress being made around Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) at Drax Power Station?
BECCS is the application of carbon capture technology onto a bioenergy power station. Capturing CO2 from a biogenic flue source means that you end up taking CO2 out of the atmosphere.
The government has already forecast that we are not going to be able to meet the fifth and certainly not the sixth carbon budgets without large-scale carbon removals. And there’s no other project that’s comparable that can do that in the UK other than Drax.
We have planning consent at Drax Power Station to convert two of the four biomass units to BECCS. Each unit that we convert will allow us to take up to 4 million tonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere per year.
And what’s really interesting, just for context, is that those 8 million tonnes of carbon removals are the equivalent to halting every departing flight from Heathrow. In terms of scale this is really significant, and it also allows us to meet our carbon targets without overly excessive changes to consumer behaviour.
So you could put a heat pump on every house in Birmingham, or you could convert two units of Drax Power station to BECCS. Both get the same derived benefit, but deploying two units of BECCS at Drax power station would give you an equivalent saving of £15 billion in whole economy costs compared to other routes to try and decarbonise to the same level.
The way I’ve tried to contextualise this to government is that it’s a straightforward lever that we can pull to help meet our carbon targets that is more impactful and less interventionist.
When does Drax expect to make a final investment decision on the BECCS project? What support are you seeking from the UK government in order to enable this investment?
Investment in our UK BECCS project remains paused while we wait to get the right policy support in place for the project. Central to this is the development of the bridging mechanism, which is a necessary step to enable us to transition from the end of our current renewable schemes, in 2027, to BECCS operations starting in 2030. We hope to see progress on its development in the coming months.
The bridging mechanism will ensure that Drax Power Station can continue to keep the lights on for millions of homes when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine as we deliver the project works.
How would you sum up the message surrounding the Humber?
I think the overarching message is that, with the right support from government, the right policy framework in place, we can effectively turbo charge the region’s economy, keep industry here in its traditional heartlands, and end up with an asset base that has enormous export potential.
It would be catastrophic for that not to come to fruition, and for us to lose our role in leading the UK’s fight against climate change and to allow the critical economy to industrialise.
