Northern Endurance Partnership celebrates first anniversary of UK’s pioneering carbon storage permit

The Northern Endurance Partnership (NEP) marked its first anniversary since the £4 billion announcement underpinning what became the UK’s first carbon storage permit, a milestone that cements its role at the centre of the country’s industrial decarbonisation strategy.

According to the original report, the NEP – developed by BP, Equinor and TotalEnergies – will form the principal CO2 transportation and storage backbone for the East Coast Cluster (ECC), collecting emissions from projects across Teesside and the Humber and moving them via onshore compression facilities and a roughly 90-mile (145 km) offshore pipeline to be injected into the Endurance saline aquifer beneath the North Sea. The project reached financial close in December 2024 and entered execution, with construction expected to begin in mid‑2025 and first injections targeted around 2027–2028. The developers estimate initial capacity at up to 4 million tonnes of CO2 per year, rising in later phases to support ambitions of up to 27 million tonnes annually by the mid‑2030s across the cluster network.

Regulatory and commercial progress has followed. In late 2024 the North Sea Transition Authority awarded the first-ever UK carbon storage permit to the NEP for injection into the Endurance aquifer, authorising up to 4 million tonnes per annum and a potential 25‑year, 100 million tonne programme. Industry announcements since then show continuing procurement and delivery: Costain completed front‑end engineering design work in early 2024 for key onshore elements of Net Zero Teesside Power and NEP, and in 2025 SLB was awarded a carbon‑storage contract to construct multiple injection wells using its Sequestri™ portfolio. Halliburton subsequently disclosed a contract to supply completions and downhole monitoring services, manufacturing much of the equipment in the UK. The company statements frame these awards as essential steps toward the NEP start‑up expected in 2028.

The ECC itself remains the primary source of captured CO2 and the economic case for the transport and storage network. According to project sponsors, the East Coast Cluster comprises 28 projects, 16 in Teesside and 12 in the Humber, ranging from power and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) to industrial capture and hydrogen production. Track 1 projects selected by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero in March 2023 include Net Zero Teesside (NZT) Power, Teesside Hydrogen CO2 Capture and the now‑cancelled H2Teesside. NZT Power, a BP–Equinor joint venture and the first planned gas‑fired power station with large‑scale carbon capture, received planning approval and government support; it is expected to capture up to two million tonnes of CO2 per year. BOC Gases’ Teesside Hydrogen CO2 Capture is set to retrofit capture on existing hydrogen production, with potential to remove more than 200,000 tonnes annually. H2Teesside was cancelled after competing land uses and interdepartmental decisions favoured an alternative data‑centre development.

Industry data shows the combined ambition is material: sponsors have projected that, by the mid‑2030s, the full NEP and cluster programme could store many millions of tonnes of CO2 annually and contribute materially to the UK government’s target of 20–30 million tonnes per year by 2030. Economic modelling cited by developers and government suggests the ECC could sustain an average of 25,000 jobs per year to 2050 and deliver roughly £2 billion of gross value add to the UK economy to 2050, with higher employment peaks during construction phases. The NEP and associated projects have already generated significant contract awards, with more than £4 billion of work announced to support deployment of NZT Power and NEP infrastructure.

At the same time, the programme highlights practical and political trade‑offs. H2Teesside’s cancellation underlined tensions between land use, departmental priorities and the pace of cluster build‑out. Sponsors and contractors continue to emphasise the need for stable policy frameworks and ongoing capital support to de‑risk large capital projects; the government’s multi‑billion pound support packages since 2023 and 2024 form part of that scaffolding. According to the project sponsors, the UK’s North Sea geology, legacy oil and gas reservoirs and saline aquifers, provides scalable storage potential, with government and industry estimates pointing to tens of gigatonnes of theoretical capacity nationally.

For industrial decarbonisation stakeholders, the NEP represents a test case for cluster‑scale CCUS delivery: it combines public funding commitments, regulatory firsts, engineering contracts and a pipeline of capture projects that together aim to transform two of the UK’s most emissions‑intensive industrial regions. The near‑term priorities will be executing the onshore and offshore works packages to hit mid‑2020s construction milestones, commissioning the initial wells and monitoring systems, and ensuring feedstock projects such as NZT Power proceed to capture in line with the transport and storage timetable. If delivered at scale, the NEP and East Coast Cluster would demonstrably expand the UK’s practical capacity to remove industrial CO2 emissions while providing a template, both technical and contractual, for further cluster roll‑out elsewhere in the country.