Net Zero and Carbon Capture: Getting Decarbonisation Projects Right From Concept

Why the projects most likely to hold their programme and their business case are the ones where design decisions, subcontract strategy and delivery sequencing are set correctly from the outset — not the ones that simply have the most capable capture technology.

Introduction

Carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) has moved from policy ambition to construction reality across the UK and Europe. The UK's Track-1 clusters — HyNet North West and the East Coast Cluster — reached financial close on their anchor projects through 2024 and 2025, and by mid-2026 several are in active construction: Net Zero Teesside (NZT) Power, a joint venture between bp and Equinor, is building what aims to be the world's first gas-fired power station fitted with carbon capture, targeting start-up in 2028; Encyclis's energy-from-waste facility at Protos has entered construction for a carbon capture unit designed to capture around 370,000 tonnes of CO2 annually; and Heidelberg Materials' Padeswood cement works is constructing what is intended to be one of the UK's first carbon capture-enabled cement plants, targeting around 800,000 tonnes of CO2 captured per year. EET Hydrogen's blue hydrogen production at Stanlow, and the Northern Endurance Partnership's shared transport and storage infrastructure serving the East Coast Cluster, are progressing on broadly similar timelines. Equivalent clusters are advancing in parallel across continental Europe as national decarbonisation strategies move from planning into delivery, with the EU's Innovation Fund and individual member states backing capture and hydrogen infrastructure across the cement, waste-to-energy, steel and chemicals sectors.

These are genuinely difficult projects to deliver well, and the reasons rarely come down to the capture technology itself — amine capture, oxy-fuel combustion and post-combustion systems are increasingly proven at scale, with multiple reference plants now operating internationally. What determines whether a decarbonisation project holds its programme and its business case is decided much earlier: in how the facility is designed against the constraints of the existing asset it is retrofitting, in how the subcontract and specialist partner strategy is structured, and in whether the delivery team assembled has the flexibility to respond as the project's real technical picture emerges through detailed design and construction. This paper sets out an engineering perspective on what getting these decisions right actually requires, drawing on the pattern already visible across the UK's first wave of Track-1 construction projects and the broader European decarbonisation pipeline behind them.

Why Retrofit Economics Dominate the Near-Term Pipeline

It is worth being explicit about why retrofit, rather than greenfield, defines the shape of this market over the next decade. New-build, purpose-designed low-carbon facilities remain a smaller part of the pipeline than capture and hydrogen infrastructure added to existing assets, for a straightforward reason: the emissions that Track-1 and equivalent European clusters are targeting first are concentrated in existing, high-emitting industrial sites — cement kilns, energy-from-waste plants, oil refineries, and gas-fired generation — that already represent enormous embedded capital and, in many cases, essential regional infrastructure that cannot simply be replaced. Decommissioning and rebuilding a cement works or an energy-from-waste facility purely to add capture capability is rarely economically or practically sensible when the existing process plant has decades of remaining service life. The commercially and environmentally rational path is retrofit: add capture, hydrogen or electrification infrastructure to the asset that already exists.

This has a direct consequence for how these projects should be approached at concept stage. A retrofit project inherits every physical and operational constraint of its host site — structural capacity, available land, existing permit envelopes, operational continuity requirements — in a way a greenfield project simply does not. Engineering teams accustomed to designing on a clean site can underestimate how significantly these inherited constraints shape what is actually buildable, and by how much they narrow the design solution space compared with a project starting from an empty plot.

Designing Right First Time on a Retrofit, Not a Greenfield Site

A capture unit designed in isolation, optimised purely against its own process requirements, can look entirely sound on paper and still create serious constructability and operability problems once it meets the reality of the host site: limited spare capacity in existing pipe racks and structural steelwork, congested access for construction plant and cranage, control systems that were never designed to accommodate an additional, tightly integrated process unit, and continued live operation of the host facility throughout much of the construction period. On a working cement plant or energy-from-waste facility, for example, the physical footprint available for a new amine capture train, its associated CO2 compression and dehydration package, and the flue gas ductwork connecting it back to existing kilns or boilers is frequently far more constrained than an equivalent greenfield layout would require — and the process of establishing exactly how constrained is itself a significant piece of early design work.

Getting the design right first time on a retrofit project means front-loading these brownfield constraints into the design process itself, not treating them as a construction-phase problem to be solved once the design is fixed. In practice, this means several things happening earlier than they might on a greenfield project. Design teams need to walk the existing site and verify genuine spare capacity in structural steelwork, pipe racks and cable routes directly, rather than relying solely on as-built drawings that may be decades old, imperfectly maintained, or simply wrong in places where informal modifications have accumulated over the asset's operating life. Ground conditions and buried services need investigating properly before foundation design for new capture equipment is finalised, since an operating industrial site frequently has decades of undocumented below-ground infrastructure that a greenfield site does not. And construction and commissioning perspective needs involving during design development — not only at handover — so that sequencing, temporary works and tie-in strategy are considered while the design can still accommodate them cheaply, rather than retrofitted into a design that has already been issued for construction.

Projects that skip this front-loading tend to discover their constructability problems during detailed design, when redesign is costly but still possible, or worse, during construction itself, at exactly the point where redesign is most expensive, most disruptive to the host site's ongoing operation, and most damaging to programme. On projects with the scale and public visibility of the UK's Track-1 clusters, a materially late redesign also carries reputational and investor-confidence consequences that extend well beyond the individual project's own budget.

Sequencing Subcontract and Specialist Partner Involvement

A decarbonisation retrofit project typically draws on a wide range of specialist capability across its lifecycle: process and mechanical design, structural and civil engineering, specialist fabrication for pressure equipment and CO2-handling pipework, instrumentation and controls integration, and a range of construction trades delivering the physical installation. The question that shapes how well a project performs is not simply which specialists are engaged, but when — and this is an area where project teams under commercial and programme pressure frequently make decisions that look reasonable in isolation but compound into avoidable difficulty later.

Bringing specialist subcontract and delivery partners in too late — after key design decisions are locked — routinely means the design has not benefited from constructability input those partners could have offered earlier, and the project inherits avoidable rework once the specialist's practical knowledge of installation sequencing, material lead times or fabrication tolerances surfaces problems the design team did not anticipate. This is a particularly common failure mode where a specialist pressure-vessel or pipework fabricator is engaged only once detailed design is substantially complete: fabrication-driven design changes at that stage are expensive precisely because so much design and procurement momentum already exists behind the original specification.

Bringing specialists in too early carries a different but equally real risk. Engaging installation or specialist contracting partners before the design has matured enough to define genuine scope means those partners are pricing and resourcing against a poorly defined brief, which generates its own cost and programme uncertainty — change control becomes the dominant commercial dynamic of the relationship, rather than efficient delivery of a well-defined scope. The projects delivering most successfully across the current wave of UK carbon capture construction appear to be those where the client or lead delivery organisation has managed this sequencing deliberately: engaging design-stage engineering expertise early enough to shape a constructible solution grounded in real site conditions, while bringing in specialist installation and commissioning partners at the point where their input adds genuine value — typically once the design has reached a level of maturity where their expertise sharpens and de-risks the solution, rather than the point where their absence has already allowed avoidable errors to become embedded in the design.

This sequencing discipline is considerably harder to achieve when a project's delivery model is fragmented across many separately contracted organisations with limited visibility of each other's programmes, incentives and risk positions. Coordinating the timing of a dozen separately procured specialist inputs, each managed through its own commercial relationship and reporting line, is itself a significant management overhead — and one that frequently falls, by default, to a client project team that may not have the specific technical depth to judge when each specialist's input genuinely adds value versus when it is simply premature. Sequencing becomes considerably easier to manage well where a delivery partner can genuinely flex its own resourcing across a project's lifecycle: supplying design engineers into a client's team at concept stage, then transitioning into a specialist contractor role as the project matures into detailed design and construction, without requiring a wholesale change of delivery organisation — and the institutional knowledge that organisation carries — partway through the project.

The Case for Genuine Delivery Agility

Decarbonisation projects of this kind rarely follow a single, predictable delivery model from concept through to commissioning, and the client's actual need shifts materially as the project matures. Early in a project's life — during feasibility, concept selection and early design — what a client typically needs is engineering capability embedded within their own team: design engineers, project controls specialists and technical advisors who can work as a genuine extension of the client's organisation while the scope and technical approach are still being defined and tested against alternatives. At this stage, the value delivered has less to do with executing a fixed scope and more to do with helping the client ask the right questions and evaluate options credibly.

As the project matures and scope firms up into a defined, biddable package, the same organisation may be better placed acting as a specialist contractor or installer for a defined package of work, taking on direct delivery responsibility for design, procurement or construction rather than remaining embedded advisory capacity. A delivery organisation capable of moving between these roles — supplying key people into a client's integrated team at concept stage, then stepping into a design, installation or specialist contracting role as the project develops — offers something a purely design-focused consultancy or a purely trades-focused contractor structurally cannot: continuity of understanding across a project's full lifecycle, without the client having to reconstruct that understanding each time a new organisation is brought in for the next phase.

This continuity is particularly valuable on brownfield retrofit projects specifically, where much of the value in early design work lies in institutional knowledge of the host site — its structural quirks, its operational rhythms, the informal history of modifications that never made it onto a drawing — that is genuinely expensive to rebuild if the design and delivery teams change completely between phases. A newly engaged specialist contractor arriving at construction stage, with no involvement in the design decisions that shaped the scope they are now pricing and delivering, is starting from a position of information disadvantage that a continuously involved delivery partner does not carry.

What This Means in Practice

Across the current generation of UK carbon capture retrofit projects, and the equivalent pipeline developing across continental Europe, three patterns are becoming clear to anyone delivering or observing this work closely. First, brownfield constraints have to be understood and designed around from the earliest stages of concept development, verified against the real physical condition of the host site rather than assumed from documentation, not discovered during construction when the cost and disruption of addressing them is far higher. Second, the sequencing of specialist and subcontract partner involvement is itself a significant driver of project outcomes — neither too early against an immature scope, nor too late to inform design — deserving deliberate planning rather than being treated as a procurement afterthought driven purely by commercial timing. Third, delivery organisations capable of flexing between embedded engineering support, design responsibility and direct specialist contracting, without a wholesale change of team at each transition, are better placed to carry institutional knowledge of a retrofit site through the project's full lifecycle than a fragmented supply chain assembled fresh at each stage, each new entrant starting again from a position of relative unfamiliarity with the site.

None of this diminishes the genuine engineering difficulty of the capture technology itself, or the scale of investment and coordination required to bring shared transport and storage infrastructure like the Liverpool Bay network or the Northern Endurance Partnership online in step with the capture projects that depend on it. But for individual project teams evaluating how to structure their own delivery approach, the technology choice is frequently the less differentiating decision. The decisions that most reliably separate projects that hold their programme from those that do not are made earlier and are less visible from the outside: how well brownfield reality was understood before design was fixed, how deliberately specialist involvement was sequenced, and whether the delivery team's structure allowed institutional knowledge to persist across the project's full lifecycle.

Staying Ahead of a Standards Landscape That Keeps Moving

The technical and regulatory framework governing carbon capture and CO2 transport infrastructure is still actively developing across the UK and Europe, from evolving guidance on dense-phase CO2 pipeline design and material selection, to the North Sea Transition Authority's licensing regime for offshore CO2 storage, to European frameworks under the EU's Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage strategy, the EU Emissions Trading System's treatment of captured carbon, and evolving industrial emissions standards across member states. This is a genuinely young and fast-moving regulatory area by comparison with more established industrial engineering disciplines, and specifications, guidance and best practice that were current eighteen months ago may already be superseded. BESAT's engineering function tracks consultations and technical guidance updates relevant to CO2 handling and brownfield decarbonisation retrofit practice as they are published, so that design and delivery advice reflects current understanding of a technology area that continues to mature, rather than a fixed specification set at project outset and never revisited.

Where BESAT Fits

BESAT works across this full lifecycle on industrial decarbonisation projects — supplying design and engineering capability directly into a client's team at concept and feasibility stage, then, where it suits the project, transitioning into a specialist design, installation or contracting role as the project matures into detailed design, construction and commissioning. That range is built by bringing engineers and specialist trades people with genuine brownfield retrofit experience onto the business as full employees, rather than assembled fresh for each new cluster project, giving clients continuity of understanding across a project's full lifecycle rather than a fresh team assembled at each new phase.