The Net Zero Teesside project, together with its associated Transportation and Storage project, the Northern Endurance Partnership, create a pathway to facilitate decarbonisation of the Teesside industrial cluster in the mid 2020s. Net Zero Teesside and the Northern Endurance Partnership are led by bp and leverage world class expertise from across industry including CF Fertilisers, BOC Gases, ENI, Equinor, National Grid, Sembcorp, Shell and Total, with confirmed support from many more stakeholders and subcontractors. The project anchor is a world first flexible gas power plant with Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) which will "compliment rather than compete with" renewables. It will capture ~2 million tonnes of CO2 annually from 2026, decarbonising 750MW of flexible power and enabling a reduction of Teesside's emissions by one third through partnership with industrial stakeholders including CF, BOC and Sembcorp. CO2 will be permanently and safely stored in a well understood large geological aquifer located in the Southern North Sea. NZT addresses widely accepted strategic national priorities - most notably to secure green recovery and drive new jobs and economic growth in regions most hit by the pandemic. NZT will also deliver on the Chancellor's pledge in the 2020 Budget to "support the construction of the UK's first CCUS power plant." The Committee on Climate Change identified both gas power with CCUS and hydrogen production using natural gas with CCUS as critical to the UK's decarbonisation strategy, and gas power with CCUS has been independently estimated to reduce the overall UK power system cost to consumers by £19bn by 2050 (compared to alternative options such as energy storage). The £61mn industry contribution coupled with £28mn grant funding should enable Teesside to subsequently build this billion-pound decarbonisation project. Private financing for CCUS projects and flexible gas power with CCUS will all be world firsts, transformative to the industry and playing a pivotal role in the UK's trajectory toward Net Zero. In conjunction with the Northern Endurance Partnership, the development is estimated to support and safeguard between 35% and 70% of existing manufacturing jobs in Tees Valley, with an annual gross benefit of up to £450mn for the Teesside region and the support of up to 5,500 direct jobs during construction. NZT would showcase a broad range of decarbonisation technologies and underpin the UK's Clean Growth strategy, securing green recovery, driving economic growth in regions hit by the pandemic and kickstarting a new market for CCUS.

The deposition of inorganic scale onto production equipment is a major flow asssurance issue in oil and gas production. The major drivers for the project are economics and safety which are both affected by the current limitations in scale prediction at engineering component surfaces. Prediction of the thermodynamic tendency of scale is now fairly advanced but there is an urgent need to address an area of real concern - the kinetics of scale deposition at engineering surfaces. This collaborative project, led by an operator and involving a company specialised in water and well sampling and a university with experience in scale research, will deliver the first scale deposition model and will advance scale management to a new level. Measurements in realistic conditions will be made and will be used to develop the semi-empirical model which will be refined by the input of real well data. The final tool to predict surface scaling will be exploited as an additional module to an existing thermodynamic precipitation model which is widely accepted by industry (MULTISCALE) through Expro. The specific objectives are: - to assess the scale kinetics at realistic temperatures and pressures on various substrates and covering a range of conditions (e.g brine chemistry, temperature, flow regime); - to develop a fundamental understanding of the surface/fluid interactions in scale deposition using multi-scale modelling and experimental techniques; - to develop and validate the first scale deposition kinetic model for carbonate scale.

The main prize sought by this project is improved economic recovery of the UK's oil and gas resources, by developing and deploying software which will improve both BP's and the wider UK oil industry's ability to manage uncertainty and risk in field development and operation. This will be accomplished by integrating the following elements: 1) Domain-specialist expertise from BP, a major oil company, with its own leading uncertainty assessment technology, Top-Down Reservoir Modelling (TDRM™). 2) Recent specific advances and expertise in optimisation and machine learning from the School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences at Heriot-Watt 3) Uncertainty quantification expertise from Petroleum Engineering at Heriot Watt and route to market through its spin-out company Epistemy. The critical success factor for this project will be an intense and time-limited collaboration, in the same geography, between a major operator (BP) and a University (Heriot-Watt and its spin-out company Epistemy), focused on development and application of state of the art methods to real business problems. The technology will be field-tested by deployment within BP's portfolio using their pre-existing TDRM™ framework.

Together, the Humber and Teesside represent almost half of the UK's industrial CO2 emissions. The Northern Endurance Partnership will create an offshore CO2 Transport and Storage system connecting two innovative First-of-a-Kind onshore capture projects, Zero Carbon Humber and Net Zero Teesside into one initial geological store facilitating decarbonisation of both industrial clusters in the 2030s. This bp led project leverages world class expertise from across industry including ENI, Equinor, NGV, Shell and Total with confirmed support from many more stakeholders and subcontractors. The combined onshore anchor projects initially aim to capture ~3 million tonnes of CO2 annually from 2026, decarbonising 750MW of flexible power at Teesside and reducing emissions by 1 million tonnes annually in Humber through fuel switching the Saltend chemicals park to Blue Hydrogen. CO2 will be permanently and safely stored in Endurance, a well understood large geological aquifer located in the Southern North Sea. The projects address widely accepted strategic national priorities -- most notably to secure green recovery and drive new jobs and economic growth in the regions which have been most hit by the pandemic. Developing gas power generation with Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) will deliver on the Chancellor's pledge to "support the construction of the UK's first CCUS power plant" (Budget 2020). In addition, the Committee on Climate Change identified both gas power with CCUS and hydrogen production from gas with CCUS (Blue Hydrogen) as critical to the UK's decarbonisation strategy -- this project will enable both. The £41mn industry contribution coupled with £24mn grant funding should enable Humber and Teesside to subsequently build these multi-billion-pound decarbonisation projects. Gas power with CCUS, large scale Blue Hydrogen and a combined offshore CCUS scheme will be world firsts playing a pivotal role in the UK's trajectory to net-zero. This project has the potential to underpin over 25,500 jobs in the Humber/Teesside area, showcasing a broad range of decarbonisation technologies, globally unparalleled in scale, optionality and ambition. This partnership will underpin the UK's Clean Growth strategy, securing green recovery and kickstarting a new market for CCUS and Hydrogen, with potential for trade across mainland Europe developing into the future.

This research project aims to evaluate how salt deformation has influenced (a) the formation the Late Pleistocene Mississippi canyon and (b) the distribution of Plio-Pleistocene submarine channel-levee systems in time and space which cross, or are deflected, by active salt diapirs. We will develop improved models for channel and salt structure interaction to serve as analogues for the more economically significant deeper subsurface areas, where similar processes occur, but may be more poorly imaged due to lower resolution seismic data or location beneath extensive salt canopies. The aims will be achieved by mapping salt bodies, structures and sedimentary depositional environments on an extensive merged 3-dimensional seismic dataset from the NE Gulf of Mexico. The evolution of the salt structures and sedimentary deposits will be reconstructed through space and time with 3D structural reconstructions and construction of palinspastically restored sedimentary facies maps. The project directly addresses the important scientific problem of understanding how sedimentary systems interact with tectonic processes, which to date has been little studied in deforming slope/deepwater passive margin environments affected by salt tectonics. We think that there are a number of advantages to investigating this general problem within a slope and deepwater sedimentary environment, using subsurface data. Firstly the 3-dimensional nature of the high quality seismic datasets offers a 3D spatial resolution of structural and stratigraphic geometries that is complementary to outcrop studies. Secondly low amplitude eustatic sea-level fluctuations have less direct control on the sedimentary response to structural growth at a local scale in slope/deepwater settings. This contrasts with the added complexity of sea-level induced base-level changes when examining terrestrial and shallow marine systems. The project has economic importance as deepwater exploration off the continental margins continues to be the main focus for the major oil companies and the results will have direct applicability within the hydrocarbon industry and thus contribute to wealth creation of UK industry. More specifically the results will be useful to hydrocarbon activity in the UK sector of the North Sea where the oil companies seek to exploit remaining reserves in the North Sea salt basins.