Hanson awards contract for CCS plant at Padeswood

UK-based Hanson, part of Heidelberg Materials, has awarded a contract to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Engineering to deliver the preliminary front-end engineering design for a CO₂ capture plant at Hanson’s Padeswood cement plant in Flintshire, north Wales.

Once operational it will capture 800,000t of CO₂ and store it in spent gas fields off the coast of northwest England. According to Hanson, it hopes to have the carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant up and running by 2027 with the project marking the UK cement industry’s first adoption of CCS technology.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Engineering plans to use its Advanced KM CDR Process™ technology, jointly developed in Japan with the Kansai Electric Power Company, on the Hanson project. This marks Mitsubishi’s third CO₂ capture project involving a cement plant, with the company having previously worked on a CCS feasibility study for Lehigh Cement Co in Alberta, Canada, and a CO₂ capture demonstration testing programme that is currently underway on behalf of the Tokuyama Corp in Japan.