MHIENG Awarded Pre-FEED Contract for Carbon Capture Plant at a Cement Production Facility in UK
-- The Project Will Have the Ability to Capture and Store 800,000 Tonnes of CO₂ Per Year --

Tokyo, December 15, 2022 – Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Engineering, Ltd. (MHIENG), part of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) Group, has been appointed by Hanson UK(Note1), a leading supplier of low carbon heavy building materials, to deliver the preliminary front-end engineering design (Pre-FEED) for a CO₂ capture plant at its Padeswood cement works located in Flintshire, Wales.

The newly awarded Pre-FEED represents MHIENG’s third project involving CO₂ capture at a cement plant, following a carbon capture and storage (CCS) feasibility study for Lehigh Cement Company in Alberta, Canada, and a CO₂ capture demonstration testing program currently underway for Tokuyama Corporation in Japan(Note2).

The project is part of a comprehensive effort to decarbonize the UK’s cement industry. This plan constitutes the UK-based cement industry’s first adoption of CCS technology.

This Pre-FEED is part of a project that will deliver a CO₂ capture plant to the Padeswood Works. Once operational, the plant will capture 800,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year and the plan is to store it in spent gas fields off the coast of North West England.

MHIENG will support the project by carrying out the Pre-FEED of a CO₂ capture plant applying its “Advanced KM CDR Process™,” CO₂ capture technology jointly developed with The Kansai Electric Power Co., Inc.

The UK Government has set ambitious targets for achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050. To achieve this goal, it has been building the necessary infrastructure, including CCUS clusters that encompass all aspects of carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) for implementation at designated industrial zones. In October 2021 HyNet and East Coast Clusters were selected as the Track 1 CCUS clusters by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). This project was subsequently shortlisted in August 2022 for potential funding when it was selected among a total of twenty CCUS and CCUS-enabled hydrogen projects chosen by BEIS to advance to the due diligence phase of its Track 1 Phase 2 cluster sequencing programme. Operational commencement of the CO₂ capture plant at the Padeswood Works is targeted for 2027.

MHIENG promotes the adoption of CO₂ capture technologies in diverse industrial applications globally: not only in conventional thermal power plants and chemical plants, but also in biomass power plants, steel mills, waste to energy plants, gas engines, ships, and amongst other applications. MHI Group is currently strengthening its position in the Energy Transition, and the development of a CO₂ solutions ecosystem is a core component of those initiatives. MHI Group will continue to help achieve wide-scale greenhouse gas emission reduction by introducing its high-performance CO₂ capture technology globally. It will also press ahead in developing new solutions to contribute to global environment protection.

• 1Hanson UK is the UK group subsidiary of Heidelberg Materials, one of the largest building materials manufacturers in the world based in Heidelberg, Germany.
• 2For further information on these projects, see:
  https://www.mhi.com/news/21012102.html
  https://www.mhi.com/news/22032901.html

About MHIENG’s CO₂ capture technologies
MHIENG (originally MHI) has been developing the KM CDR Process™ (Kansai Mitsubishi Carbon Dioxide Recovery Process) and the Advanced KM CDR Process™ in collaboration with Kansai Electric Power since 1990, and today MHIENG stands as a global leader in this field. As of December 2022, the company has delivered 14 plants adopting the KM CDR Process™, and two more are currently under construction. The Advanced KM CDR Process™, selected for the Padeswood cement plant project, uses KS-21™, which incorporates technological improvements over the KS-1™ solvent adopted at all 14 of the commercial CO₂ capture plants MHIENG has delivered to date. The advanced version offers superior regeneration efficiency and lower deterioration than KS-1™, and it has been verified to provide excellent energy saving performance, reduce operation costs, and result in low amine emissions.

For further information on MHIENG’s CO₂ capture plants:

• https://www.mhi.com/products/engineering/co2plants.html