Turner & Townsend will provide project management consultant (PMC) services for the project, where carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) technology will be retrofitted and integrated to the Runcorn site.
The project will also lay the groundwork to integrate the facility with the HyNet North West low carbon and hydrogen energy cluster. HyNet is a scheme to enable the carbon dioxide captured at Runcorn to be transported and permanently stored offshore in depleted Liverpool Bay gas fields.
The first priority for the Runcorn CCUS project is to develop a phase two submission to the Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) industrial decarbonisation challenge fund.
Runcorn is key to Viridor’s plan to achieve net zero emissions by 2040. Viridor hopes that it will be the first net negative emissions waste and recycling company in the UK by 2045. Developing modular CCUS plants on another five waste-to-energy incinerators combined with two planned CCUS plants, would save something like 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 emissions a year, Viridor has calculated. It would also create around 1,000 construction jobs.
Turner & Townsend natural resources director Andrew Etherington said: “The installation of CCUS technology at the Runcorn energy from waste facility is a first of a kind project in the UK and a major enabler of the new low carbon industrial age.”
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