Clair Gough is a CoI on a new Network+ programme grant to continue the work of the UK Carbon Capture and Storage Centre until 2025
13 October 2021
The UK is seeing an unprecedented rise in CCS activity, with deployment planned to go from currently nothing to 10 million tonnes of CO2 captured and stored per year by 2030 with continued growth in the sector thereafter to underpin the UK’s net-zero target.
The UK Carbon Capture and Storage Centre has received funding from the EPSRC, within the UKRI Energy Programme, to continue its work until 2025, in the form of a new Network+ programme.
Networking by the UK CCS Research Centre, as an inclusive and open virtual national hub, has helped to start now-mainstream UK initiatives on industrial decarbonisation (2012) and CCS clusters (2016).
The UKCCSRC’s overall aim with its new funding is to maintain a UK scientific lead in CCS, that the existence of an inclusive EPSRC-supported CCS network since 2009 has helped to establish, with strong and focused networking with a successful CCS industry sector.
The UKCCSRC Network+ will be essential to support a broadening of the UK research base to include a much wider range of scientific disciplines, matching the increasingly complex research challenges of deployment. The UKCCSRC Network+ will also play a key part in building new high-tech CCS industries, with scope for extensive learning-by-doing once the first UK CCS plants are in service and CO2 transport and storage infrastructure is in place for new projects to use.
Through its potential to decarbonise key industrial processes and provide essential infrastructure for greenhouse gas removal technologies, CCS is critical to achieving net zero.