New Energy World™
New Energy World™ embraces the whole energy industry as it connects and converges to address the decarbonisation challenge. It covers progress being made across the industry, from the dynamics under way to reduce emissions in oil and gas, through improvements to the efficiency of energy conversion and use, to cutting-edge initiatives in renewable and low-carbon technologies.
Getting to know CO2
29/10/2025
8 min read
Feature
The UK is developing three carbon capture and storage (CCS) hubs, HyNet in Liverpool Bay, the Peak Cluster and the East Coast Cluster around the River Humber. They all envisage pumping quantities of CO2 gas through pipelines. While those facilities are being designed and built, more searching questions about CO2 streams – in terms of the physical plant, CO2’s large-scale behaviour, and what are the maximum limits of impurities in the stream – are being tackled through fundamental research, reports New Energy World Senior Editor Will Dalrymple.
One of the more remote energy research facilities in the UK is Cumbria’s Spadeadam, an 80-hectare jumble of trenches, ponds, concrete pads and pipe sections, completely surrounded by an RAF base of the same name that itself hosts one of the largest electronic warfare tactics sites in Europe.
Fifty years ago, when gas from the North Sea was envisaged to be distributed through a national pipeline network, Spadeadam carried out large-scale testing to understand its behaviour, particularly in emergency situations. But over the last decade or so, its focus has shifted to CO2, points out Andy Cummings, Senior Principal Consultant at DNV, which manages the site.
He says: ‘The risks of CO2 are completely different to natural gas. Doing these experiments at scale provides us with the ability to look at risks and manage them in a real, live situation. Seeing a pipeline fail and what happens with the material in the pipeline, whether [natural] gas or CO2, whether it disperses or ignites. We have the ability from this site to understand how it behaves.’