Exxon and Shell join Scottish carbon capture project

Exxon and Shell join Scottish carbon capture project

The Acorn carbon capture and storage project in north-east Scotland has signed provisional deals with customers including ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell and a company backed by Kuwait's sovereign wealth fund, bringing together some of the largest operators in the UK North Sea.

Acorn, which aims to be among the UK's first large-scale operational CCS projects by the middle of this decade, plans initially to capture carbon from the St Fergus terminals where about a third of all natural gas consumed in the UK comes ashore.

The memorandums of understanding announced on Friday cover two of the three terminals at St Fergus, one of which is jointly owned by ExxonMobil and Shell. The other is owned by North Stream Midstream Partners, which bought the terminal and its main feeder pipelines in 2015.

NSMP is jointly owned by the Kuwait Investment Authority and the JPMorgan Infrastructure Investments Fund.

"Signing the MoU to begin this important work on the St Fergus CO2 emissions represents a key milestone for the Acorn Project," said Nick Cooper, chief executive of Storegga, whose subsidiary Pale Blue Dot is leading the project in partnership with Shell and Harbour Energy, two of the largest producers in the UK North Sea.

"These emissions should be the first of