The UK government has approved plans for a 55km carbon capture pipeline in eastern England.
The Viking CCS pipeline will transport captured carbon dioxide from industrial sites near Immingham on the Humber estuary to the Theddlethorpe Gas Terminal on the Lincolnshire coast – a stretch of North Sea shoreline in the east of England.
From there, it will connect to the existing LOGGS pipeline system, which historically transported natural gas from offshore fields to the mainland and will now be repurposed for CO2 storage.
The pipeline is a key component of the Viking CCS cluster, a joint initiative between energy outfits Harbour Energy and BP. Once operational, it will support large-scale decarbonisation of the Humber region, known to be the UK’s most carbon-intensive industrial cluster, and forms part of the country’s broader Net Zero Strategy.
The project was submitted by Chrysaor Production (UK), an oil and gas exploration and production company that merged with Premier Oil in 2021 to form Harbour Energy, now the UK’s largest independent oil and gas operator.
Captured CO2 will be transported and stored deep beneath depleted gas fields in the southern North Sea.
The application was approved by the UK’s Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero following a six-month review by the country’s Planning Inspectorate.
The pipeline is expected to transport up to 11 million tonnes of CO2 per year. Harbour Energy is aiming to begin operations in 2028, pending a final investment decision.
The development will also include supporting infrastructure such as valves, monitoring systems, access roads and temporary construction compounds.
First proposed in 2022, the Viking CCS project has been shortlisted under the UK Government’s Track-2 cluster sequencing programme. Harbour Energy estimates the total cost of the project at around £1.3bn ($1.7bn), with the potential to store up to 300 million tonnes of CO2 over its lifetime in the depleted Viking and Victor gas fields beneath the North Sea.
Earlier this week another company contributing to the project announced some news.
London-based recycling and waste management supplier Cory Group, which is developing a CCS project at Belvedere in south-east London that will collect CO2 bound for Viking, said it is partnering with UK university Imperial College London to drive innovation in CCS.
