The pipes and platforms are going in. Whether they fill up depends on the next wave of industrial sites, and on the cost of capturing their CO₂.
In early October, a new offshore platform was installed in Liverpool Bay. Its operator, Eni, describes Douglas CCS as the world's first offshore platform built specifically for storing CO₂ from industry. It will receive carbon captured across North West England and North Wales and route it to depleted gas fields under the Irish Sea.
The network it serves, the transport and storage system behind the HyNet cluster, is now around half built. On the east coast, the Northern Endurance Partnership is laying the equivalent spine for Teesside and the Humber.
This is real progress. For years, UK carbon capture was mostly announcements. Now it is steel in the water.
The first wave is under way
According to the Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA), of which Tree Associates is a member, the first five projects across HyNet and the East Coast Cluster have already placed more than £4 billion of contracts with around 350 companies. Both clusters are sourcing more than half their supply chain in the UK, and around 5,500 people are working on construction.
Those first projects were chosen and supported directly by government. They are the anchor tenants that justify building the networks in the first place.
The harder question: who comes next?
The CCSA says more than 100 further capture and removal projects want access to these networks. That queue matters more than the first five. Shared infrastructure only pays off when many sites connect to it.
Many of those follow-on projects are in the hardest sectors to decarbonise: cement, lime, steel and refining. In these industries, much of the CO₂ comes from the chemistry of the process itself, not from burning fuel. Switching to renewable power does not remove it. Capture is one of the few options left.
The CCSA is now asking government for clear, investable frameworks so that follow-on projects can reach a final investment decision during this Parliament. Without them, it warns, new infrastructure risks running under capacity and investment could move overseas.
Policy is half the answer
A clear route to investment is essential. But it does not solve the other half of the problem: the cost of capture itself.
We saw this in Canada this summer. Heidelberg Materials paused a CAD$1.36 billion capture project at its Edmonton cement plant. The pilot had worked. The project stalled because the carbon price was lower than the business case assumed, and capital costs had risen.
The technology was proven. The economics were not.
For most industrial sites, conventional capture means amine solvent systems. They are well understood, but they bring a large energy penalty, solvent handling and replacement, and significant plant footprint. For a lime kiln or a mid-sized cement works, those costs can decide whether a project happens at all.
What the next 100 projects need
If the UK wants its new networks to fill up, follow-on projects need three things:
A clear route to a final investment decision, with business models that industrial operators and their lenders can bank on.
Access to transport and storage, on terms and timescales that work for sites outside the first wave.
Capture technology that costs less to build and run, so that projects stand up at today's carbon price, not a hoped-for future one.
The first two are for government and network operators. The third is an engineering problem.
Where Tree Associates fits
That engineering problem is the one we are working on. Tree Capture is a patented, amine-free carbon capture system designed for hard-to-abate industries such as cement, lime, steel and refining. Instead of chemical solvents, it uses cooling and compression to separate CO₂ directly from flue gas, removing the solvent handling and steam demand that come with amine systems.
The UK has started building the infrastructure. The next step is making sure the industries that need it most can afford to connect.
