LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s Drax Group and U.S. engineering company Bechtel have teamed up to identify opportunities to build new bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) power plants around the world, they said on Friday.
BECCS is a negative emissions technology which extracts bioenergy from biomass and then captures and stores the carbon dioxide but is not yet at commercial scale.
Drax has a pilot BECCS project at its power station in Yorkshire.
“Negative emissions technologies such as BECCS are crucial in tackling the global climate crisis and at Drax we’re planning to retrofit this to our UK power station, demonstrating global climate leadership in the transformation of a former coal-fired power station,” said Jason Shipstone, Drax Group’s Chief Innovation Officer.
Bechtel said it will study potential regions for new BECCS plants, including North America and western Europe, and how to optimise the design of BECCS plants to maximise efficiency and cost.
(Reporting by Nina Chestney)
