United Kingdom – The Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has chosen the Ince Bio Power facility of Bioenergy Infrastructure Group (BIG), situated at Peel NRE’s Protos in the Net Zero North West industrial cluster, and funded it through the Net Zero Innovation Portfolio (NZIP) to develop a carbon capture demonstration project that is intended to scale carbon capture technology.
The UK’s first biomass waste gasification facility to use the technology will be Ince Bio Power as part of the Ince Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage (InBECCS) project.
Phase 2 of InBECCS is marked by the announcement. The CCS facility was successfully designed in Phase 1, and a feasibility study for its operation was conducted. In order to secure additional funding for the development of the demonstration plant, BIG has now confirmed that their submission for the 2nd phase of the BEIS Direct Air Capture and other Greenhouse Gas Removal technologies competition was accepted.
The largest waste wood gasification plant in the UK, the Ince Bio Power Plant, is owned, operated, and managed by BIG, which is also in charge of the project. A 22 megawatt facility called Ince Bio Power uses commercial waste wood that would otherwise end up in a landfill to generate electricity for more than 42,500 homes.
Demonstrating negative emissions
With the ability to capture over 7,000 tonnes of carbon annually, the InBECCS project will set the standard for the first project of its kind to demonstrate negative emissions. In order to support the path to net zero through negative emissions technologies, BIG plans to have the commercial scale CCS plant operational by 2027 or earlier.
The HyNet low carbon and hydrogen energy cluster, one of two clusters to receive “Track 1” status as part of the government’s Industrial Decarbonization Challenge, is housed in the Net Zero North West industrial cluster, where Ince Bio Power is situated.
To advance the project, BIG is collaborating with technology provider C-Capture—developers of cutting-edge chemical processes for the removal of carbon dioxide—and top engineering professional services firm WSP. The demonstration plant’s purpose is to de-risk the technology’s future commercial rollout and to provide important data to support its development.
