Ørsted’s Offshore Wind and BP’s CCUS Plans Clash in UK Waters

Ørsted and BP have submitted position statements to the UK Planning Inspectorate with regard to their offshore wind and carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) projects in the UK, with Ørsted saying BP is trying to force exclusion so that the offshore wind developer cannot locate its Hornsea Four turbines in an overlapping seabed area.

Namely, both the 2.6 GW Hornsea Four offshore wind farm and the Northern Endurance Partnership (NEP) offshore carbon dioxide ‎‎(CO2) transport and storage project are proposed to be situated within an overlapping area of the seabed offshore the UK.

Back in 2013, the parties behind the two projects at the time, Smart Wind Limited behind Hornsea Four and National Grid Twenty Nine Limited behind NEP, which already has a licence, agreed to enter into an Interface Agreement to seek to regulate and co-ordinate their activities with a view of managing potential and resolving actual conflicts.

The current licensee of the NEP project site is a consortium between Carbon Sentinel Limited (previously known as National Grid Twenty Nine Limited), Equinor, and BP, with BP being the operator of the licence on behalf of its partners.

Ørsted says it proposed protective provisions for the benefit of the NEP project in its draft development consent order (DCO) for Hornsea Four, which envisage co-existence in the Overlap Zone, while BP proposed protective provisions also for the benefit of its project, which would prevent the development of Hornsea Four infrastructure in the part of the Overlap Zone in which the carbon storage project would be located, referred to as the Exclusion Area.

According to Ørsted, BP’s objective is to force exclusion so that the company cannot locate turbines in the Overlap Zone “rather than focus upon mitigating the impact of either project upon the other”. The offshore wind developer also says BP’s proposed protective provisions “seek to disapply the Interface Agreement”.

BP, on the other hand, says the mitigation Ørsted relies upon to enable co-existence to be successfully achieved in the Overlap Zone is “unspecified and undeliverable, and therefore their assessment is flawed”.

“There is no circumstance in which NEP would be able technically or financially to carry out the NEP project as part of the ECC plan if development of Hornsea 4 infrastructure is allowed in the Exclusion Area”, BP states in its position statement.

The oil and gas major suggested that the examining authority requests that Ørsted provides a supplemental assessment, setting out the environmental impacts of Hornsea Four in the event that NEP’s protective provisions are adopted, preventing any activities by Orsted in the Exclusion Area, and a revised assessment of the effects in the absence of those protective provisions, addressing the mitigation BP identified as flawed.

The examination of the Hornsea Four DCO application at the Planning Inspectorate began on 22 February 2022, after the developer submitted the application in October last year.