Understanding the Technological and Economic Drivers of the Development of CCUS Clusters in the United Kingdom

The deployment of industrial clusters for decarbonisation is key to the UK's transition to a net zero economy. Since the large scale deployment of CCUS requires the development of significant and expensive infrastructure for both CO2 transport and storage, detailed consideration of policy and economic impacts as well as cost reduction of these elements of the CCUS value chain is key for the viability of a cluster. This exciting project will combine expertise from both economics and engineering to address this challenge, and will benefit from significant input from industrial stakeholders.

This project will seek to develop a novel approach to understand the design and evolution of CCUS clusters in the UK. The design of the required transportation system requires a detailed cost benefit analysis and optimisation of the cluster CO2 transportation network over long time scales, minimising the total costs for CO2 transport and storage, whilst considering potential capacity expansion or contraction over time.

The project will seek to characterise and incorporate individual industrial actors' strategic behaviour within clusters. This will include long-term economic and business models to understand the drivers of firms' investments in the CCUS infrastructure as well as the role of the policy-maker in setting policies to encourage or facilitate the development of the network. This will be used to provide strategic and policy recommendations for the development and evolution of CCUS clusters.