Balfour Beatty to kick off Net Zero Teesside Power
Working with Technip Industries and GE Vernova, the contractor has received notice to proceed from NZT Power’s partners, triggering a £1.5bn project that combines a gas-fired power station with carbon capture.
Balfour and its partners are supported by technology partner Shell Catalysts & Technologies at the onshore power, capture, and compression Net Zero Teesside scheme. NZT Power is a joint venture between BP and Equinor, the Norwegian state-owned energy company.
The formal Notice to Proceed means the start of the full engineering, procurement and construction package for the project. The notice follows NZT Power reaching financial close and the UK government’s recent announcement of a £21.7bn pledge for projects to capture and store carbon emissions from energy, industry and hydrogen production.
A development consent order was secured in February this year.
Net Zero Teesside aims to be the world’s first gas-fired power station with carbon capture and storage.
Up to 2m tonnes of CO2 per year could be captured at the plant and transported and permanently stored by the Northern Endurance Partnership, also a partnership between BP and Equinor, with Total Energies holding a 10% stake.
NEP, which covers three carbon capture, storage and transportation projects around Teesside, has also today announced it has reached financial close, meaning both projects will move into the execution phase.
Costain is supporting as a delivery partner. Construction is expected to start from mid-2025, with start-up expected in 2028. Together, the NZT and NEP projects are worth a combined £4bn.
The plant could produce up to 742 megawatts of flexible, dispatchable low-carbon power, equivalent to the average annual electricity requirements of more than 1m UK homes, further supporting the UK’s transition to a cleaner energy future.
Alongside its consortium partners, Balfour Beatty is aiming to construct a highly efficient combined-cycle plant, integrated with a carbon capture plant using Technip Energies’ Canopy by T.EN solution powered by the Shell CANSOLV CO2 capture technology.
The plant will be powered by GE Vernova’s advanced 9HA.02 gas turbine.
Balfour Beatty will bring multidisciplinary capabilities to bear, including civil engineering, ground engineering and power transmission and distribution expertise together with its industrial M&E heritage.
Leo Quinn, Balfour Beatty group chief executive, said: “Net Zero Teesside is a transformational project, underpinning the UK’s transition to cleaner and greener energy consumption and driving regional economic growth in North East England.
“Today’s announcement takes us one step closer to realising this ambitious scheme, which will demonstrate collaboration at its finest and see us unite our unique strengths together with Technip Energies’ world-leading engineering and technology integration skills, Shell Cansolv’s state-of-the-art carbon capture technology and GE Vernova’s unparalleled power generation knowledge.”
Arnaud Pieton, chief executive of Technip Energies, said: “This groundbreaking project represents a significant milestone in our collective efforts to advance carbon capture technology at scale and support the UK’s ambitious climate goals through low carbon power generation from gas combined with renewables.”
The project’s promoters said that Net Zero Teesside Power is projected to create and support more than 3,000 construction jobs and then require around 1,000 jobs annually during operations until 2050.
