On Wednesday 25 September 2024, Essar Energy Transition (EET) opened the doors to its oil refinery in Stanlow, Ellesmere Port, providing a tour of the refinery for ex-workers. Luckily, I managed to find myself on one of the coaches heading through the gates of the petrochemical plant. While on site, I joined a guided tour of the processing plants, and learned the role each would have in the upcoming transition, as the refinery process switches from being powered by fuel oil to hydrogen gas.
However, information picked up on the tour, along with incidents being investigated by the Environment Agency either side of the tour, suggests that there’s work to do to make this transition to proposed greener energy a fair one for the residents living around it as well as the environment.
The day kicked off in the Oak Room of the Whitby Sports and Social Club, which is sometimes still referred to as The Shell Club, given its history as a social club for the refinery workers. Over 50 of those ex-employees gathered to celebrate the 2024 centenary of the refinery, hosted by the new owners.
The event started with people sharing stories of their time working there, with the earliest starter joining way back in 1952, following which representatives from EET then pitched their plans to those in the Oak Room, to reduce the refinery’s carbon emissions by 95%, before we boarded the coaches to tour the refinery.
The Stanlow ‘cat cracker’ that is used to produce useable fossil fuels
One of the stops on the tour was the catalytic cracking unit, the aged ‘cat cracker’, which has been here since the 1980s. This is a processing unit that takes the sludgy residue from the first stage of crude oil refining and turns it into money-spinning petroleum products.
Opposite the cat cracker is the planned site for the plant tasked with capturing the carbon dioxide (CO2) that the cracker produces. This unit currently releases 800,000 tonnes of CO2 a year into the atmosphere. That’s just under half of the two million tonnes a year released by the entire refinery, all from one processing plant.
The carbon that is captured will then begin its journey to Liverpool Bay, where it will be stored in the chasms in the seabed left by the extraction of natural gas, which itself is used to manufacture hydrogen at Stanlow. A neat, circular solution on paper, and marketed as such by HyNet, the overarching project coordinating the net zero aims of industry in North West England.
But a recent letter to Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, penned by leading climate scientists, suggests the technologies to produce ‘blue’ hydrogen (manufactured from natural gas), as well as capture and store CO2, are either unproven or could even hinder net zero efforts.
Undersea carbon storage is an experimental solution
Currently, there are only two undersea carbon storage sites in existence, the Norwegian Sleipner and Snihvit fields. They are far smaller than the Liverpool Bay plans and have already run into problems of CO2 escaping from the bedrock.
CO2 storage in these Norwegian fields is on a far smaller scale than the proposals by HyNet to store CO2 in Liverpool Bay. As well as the risk of potential leaks, The Liverpool Bay site is also smaller than initially modelled, with portions of the gas field lying shallower than the 800m threshold to store CO2, with some scientists suggesting this casts doubt on the feasibility of the project until further geological research is undertaken.
There is also the issue of CO2 escaping from pipelines before it reaches the storage sites. This happened in Mississippi in 2020, where 45 people were hospitalised due to a leak of CO2 after rainfall loosened soil surrounding the pipeline, leading to slippage and a rupture lasting four hours.
Since the gas is an asphyxiant heavier than air, if it escapes it tends to hang around rather than float away on the wind. This may not be as much of a problem for residents living closest to the refinery, given pipelines may extend straight out to sea. However, escaping CO2 can still lead to problems of ocean acidification, damage to ecosystems and the acceleration of global heating.
We are yet to see exactly where the pipelines will run in the Stanlow plan, but two hydrogen plants are being built near the two villages of Ince and Elton, located just over half a mile away from the proposed hydrogen manufacturing plants, which are closer than any pre-existing plant in the refinery. The pipeline, operated by ENI, will run from these plants, continuing between Stanlow and Ince, just 1.2m below ground, and out to sea.
Locking away CO2 allows fossil fuel use to continue longer
Another argument against carbon capture and storage is that CO2 will forever be locked out of the carbon cycle. Capturing and locking away CO2 stops it from entering the atmosphere and contributing to global warming. This process also removes it from the natural CO2 cycle, potentially stopping it from being processed by plants and trees back into oxygen.
While the manufacturing of fossil fuels alters this natural CO2 cycle anyway, CO2 capture and storage technology is a solution offered to the problem of how we can reduce our ever-increasing impact on nature.
In other words, this solution offers a way to continue the unsustainable extraction of fossil fuels through more intense geotechnology rather than find ways to reduce our dependence on them by increasing investment in public transport, renewable energy, or the insulation of homes.
Is the proposed Stanlow carbon capture solution sustainable?
The proposed solution of storing CO2 in depleted gas fields in Liverpool Bay is presented as a neat, circular solution. However, the process of locking CO2 away to nullify humans’ negative impacts on the environment paradoxically requires more intense alterations of it. Burying surplus CO2 deep in the Earth’s bedrock is a sign that nature will continue to be a battleground for human progress. On a planetary scale, these proposals will remain unsustainable, requiring further interference with million-year-old fossil fuels and sedimentary rock to shore up much shorter-term economic timescales.
The letter penned to Miliband makes this point – firstly that we’ll still need to extract, transport and manufacture natural gas in order to make hydrogen, and secondly, that although carbon storage is proposed as a green solution, 80% of the CO2 that is captured is reinjected into oil or gas fields to facilitate further fossil fuel extraction.
While the plan so far is that the carbon captured as part of HyNet’s plans will be sent to depleted gas fields in 1km-deep sandstone reservoirs 20 miles out to sea, with nothing suggesting that the injected CO2 will help with further extraction, there often remains residual gas in depleted fields, raising a question of whether any of this natural gas will indeed be extracted, or how this could impact the capacity of the storage site.
Not long before I went on the tour, 50 tonnes of catalyst was released into the atmosphere around the refinery, following a reported malfunction of the Catalytic Cracker. The subsequent expulsion of the sand-like catalyst into the air coated windows and cars as far away as Hooton, five miles away, leading to the UK Health Security Agency advising anyone living in the fallout zone who suffers from respiratory problems to contact their local health authority.
Hydrogen power and carbon storage will not reduce risks like this, associated with the operation of the refinery, nor will existing units like the 40-year-old cat cracker and the more than 50-year-old crude oil distillation units be replaced. This means that issues faced by residents, written about before for North West Bylines, won’t cease.
A couple of days after the tour, it was also reported that a cockle farm in Leasowe, on the north coast of the Wirral peninsula, was to close following an oil spill from Stanlow. Both of these incidents are currently being investigated by the Environment Agency, along with a third investigation following a petrol spill from a single tank in July 2023.
Impact on the local population should be a factor too
While the technical side of this experiment has been well thought out and funded, the social aspect still appears to be neglected. Consultation with residents regarding the project is virtually non-existent, and communication between the refinery and people living around it is often scant after previous incidents have occurred.
On top of this, while on the tour a rather prescient question was asked as to how this arrival of hydrogen power at the refinery would impact jobs on site. The answer given was that it won’t lead to any considerable uptick in employment on the Stanlow site, which currently stands at around 1,000 employed staff and 1,000 contractors.
Following the confirmation of £5bn of investment, the project will no doubt rumble on. Large-scale hydrogen infrastructure projects, requiring billions of pounds of investment in technology, have already started on the site and will potentially lock us into fossil fuel production for decades so investors can realise their returns.
The announcement of this funding came weeks after the decision by the new Labour government to cut winter fuel payments for all but the poorest of pensioners – with local MP Justin Madders also voting in favour. With little public effort to insulate homes, charge a windfall tax on energy producers, or invest in public transport, this is perhaps indicative of the future we may be headed towards. On a local level this, along with concerns over the refinery’s emissions and impact on the environment being ignored, suggests that those living in the shadow of this large-scale green infrastructure project will continue to see the industry and its promises of profit being given primacy over people and their pockets.
Miliband has responded to the letter by doubling down, suggesting that decarbonising is one way to reindustrialise. However, as long as our economy is coupled to the unsustainable production of fossil fuels, then any effort to decarbonise this production will remain destructive.
Admittedly, it’s hard to see an uncoupling any time soon. The fossil fuel industry being awarded financial support by the UK government for decarbonisation projects here in the North West as well as Teesside – despite registering record profits in recent years and a UN announcement that we could see a temperature increase of 3.1 degrees by the end of the century – suggests unstinting support of the industry by the government.
Until we get closer to a concerted effort to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, any effort to reduce the environmental and operational impact of its production is of course needed. However, the overarching global concerns by scientists over both the feasibility and long-term negative impacts of these carbon capture projects and over the capacity of the captured CO2’s eventual home in the Liverpool Bay Field, as well as localised concerns over the risks of pipeline leaks impacting residents, will all have to be addressed by HyNet.
