The beginning of March saw the TVCA’s Head of Net Zero heading to a council committee meeting in Redcar, I found his slideshow presentation, and the accompanying commentary, extremely misleading. It’s time to set the record straight.
Off to the seaside
Monday 2 March, and a trip to Redcar. Not for a Pacitto’s Lemon Top, or a bracing stroll along the promenade. But a meeting of the snappily entitled ‘Redcar & Cleveland Borough Council Climate & Environment Scrutiny & Improvement Committee’
Head of Net Zero
I was there to attend a presentation by the Tees Valley Combined Authority (TVCA) Head of Net Zero, Chris Rowell. Rowell was an interesting choice for this role. As can be seen from his LinkedIn profile below, Chris Rowell is a political animal. And a conservative one at that.
Once a Conservative…
Chris Rowell was regional chair of Conservative Future in 2014. He spent time at Graham Robb’s Recognition PR firm from 2015 to 2017. At the time, the company specialized in running public relations for Conservative Party politicians. Rowell was hired by Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen as a policy advisor shortly after leaving Recognition PR. However, he was brought on to the TVCA payroll at this stage.
…always a Conservative
Chris Rowell has worked at the TVCA ever since, but he moved to a ‘non-political’ role in 2020. He was promoted to his current role in April 2023. Rowell and Houchen had a mutual connection at Recognition PR; The company’s founder, Graham Robb, who was also a former Conservative Party Parliamentary candidate, was a member of the South Tees Development Corporation (STDC) board while Ben Houchen was chair. This was from its inception as a shadow board in 2016 until Robb left the board in 2024.
On tonight’s show
Chris will be visiting all of the five constituent local authorities in the Tees Valley to update them on the Tees Valley’s ambitions. Specifically the plan “will set out how CO2 emissions from Teesside’s heavy industrial sector can be reduced to Net Zero by 2040”. The full PowerPoint presentation can be found in ‘Further Reading’ at the end of this article.
Next slide please
So, first up, what role will Carbon Capture play? Or Carbon Capture Utilisation and Storage (CCUS), to give it its full name. I’ll use the abbreviation throughout this article. I’ve debunked Teesside’s CCUS ambitions as a fossil-fuel confidence trick several times. You can read some examples here and here. But, for the purposes of this exercise, let’s hear Chris’ thoughts on the five key CCUS projects on Teesside
East Coast Cluster (ECC)
The ECC is a partnership between Net Zero Teesside (NZT) and Zero Carbon Humber to manage a network of pipelines for CCUS. See Northern Endurance Partnership for more.
Northern Endurance Partnership (NEP)
The NEP will compress and transport CO2 via a subsea pipeline over 145 km to the Endurance Store in the North Sea. From there, the CO2 will be injected into a saline aquifer, known as the Endurance Aquifer, approximately 1 km below the seabed, where it will stay forever. The aquifer has a capacity of 1bn tonnes of CO2. I’m not making any of this up..,A saline aquifer is a porous layer of rock, saturated with salt water, into which the CO2 is inserted. The diagram below shows how this works, although in this example the aquifer has leaked CO2
NZT Power
Net Zero Teesside Power, or NZT Power, is confusingly sometimes just known NZT. This is a joint venture between BP and Equinor, which will be the UK’s first gas-fired power station with integrated CCUS infrastructure. Two million tonnes of CO2 produced by NZT will be buried under the North Sea, courtesy of the NEP. NZT is a £4bn project by the joint venture partners, although it is heavily subsidised by the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ). But NZT will still burn fossil fuel natural gas, and it cannot be included in any journey to Net Zero, even if CCUS is successful.
British Oxygen Company (BOC)
BOS is included in the presentation, but Chris confirmed that the company will not proceed with CCUS at this stage, so this reference needs to be removed from the slide show.
H2Teesside
The fifth, and last, project on this slide, H2Teesside, should also have been removed from Chris’ presentation. H2Teesside was a Blue Hydrogen (H2) project which would have sent CO2 to the Endurance Aquifer via the NEP, but this project was cancelled in December 2025.
Hydrogen (H2)
H2 is the next slide in the presentation. It begins on a bullish note. “The Tees Valley is at the forefront of the UK’s H2, producing 50% of the country’s product”. By 2030, H2 could be supporting up to 4,000 ‘high-value’ direct jobs in the Tees Valley. Precisely the same number that it does in 2026, assuming that there won’t be any more closures in Teesside’s chemical sector in the next four years. But what’s this got to do with Net Zero anyway?.
How Green was my H2?
All of the H2 produced in the UK is ‘grey’ H2, produced from fossil fuel natural gas. And there’s nothing ‘Green’ or ‘Net Zero’ about grey H2; in fact, quite the opposite. At some stage, some of this ‘grey’ H2 production may involve CCUS. If and when that happens, it will become ‘blue’ H2, which is still produced from fossil fuel natural gas, and will take us precisely nowhere on the road to Net Zero.
So here is a map
The next slide is a map of the Tees Valley’s H2 projects, starting with H2Teesside, which would produce 1 Megawatt (MW) of blue H2 per year. Not a good place to start, though; that’s been cancelled, remember? The next project is H2NorthEast, another blue H2 project, due to produce 1 MW of blue H2 per year. But Chris confirmed that H2NorthEast has just been put on hiatus due to the exorbitant cost of producing blue H2, so this project should also have been removed from the slide. Here’s the map of the Tees Valley’s H2 projects, some of which may one day exist:
Next please
BOC is the first project on the map. Come on Chris, pay attention! You’ve only just told us that that’s been cancelled too. The next four projects are green H2 projects, the first ones mentioned today, These are Protium Green Hydrogen, Wilton Green Hydrogen, Teesside Green Hydrogen, and the confusingly similarly named Tees Green Hydrogen.
Ancient History
Protium recently announced a move from Wilton to Haverton Hill, but hasn’t explained why the project went nowhere for more than six years while it was still at Wilton. Similarly, Tees Green Hydrogen has been gathering dust for four years. Wilton Green Hydrogen’s announcement is a mere two years old, and you never know, it may happen one day. Teesside Green Hydrogen was announced last year. Time for a periodic reminder that ‘green’ H2 production requires use of PFAs (known as forever chemicals), something that its proponents never mention.
A Hill of Beans
In the unlikely event that these four green H2 schemes all see the light of day, and can explain where they are going to source their renewable energy, they will produce a total of 450 Gigawatts (GW) of H2 per year, less than a quarter as much as H2Teesside and H2NorthEast would have produced between them if they had gone ahead.
H2 Refuelling Stations
There’s an honourable mention for ‘Element – 2’, which is building the Tees Valley Hydrogen Hub. This is quoted in the present tense for some reason. The project was announced in October 2024, but things have gotten very quiet since then. If Element – 2’s H2 refuelling station ever gets built, it won’t be able to supply the promised green H2, because this won’t be available in the region for quite some years. H2 refuelling projects at Teesside Airport have got a chequered history, as reported here. Hydrasun gets a mention too. It has built a H2 filling station at Redcar & Cleveland College, But there are very few H2 vehicles in Teesside, or anywhere else for that matter. H2 vehicles will soon be extinct as a mode of transport.
Sustainable fuels
On to the next part of the Slide Show, which is a map:
Seeing double
Something odd here straight away. Nova Pangaea Technologies and Lanza Jet are shown separately for some reason, but they’re the same Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) project on the same site. They’re part of Project Speedbird, as could be seen on Chris’ next slide:
More SAF
You can read more on Project Speedbird here. Willis SAF, Arcadia eFuels, Greenergy and Alfanar are also SAF projects. Despite the hype, no SAF has ever been produced on Teesside, and it’ll probably be a while before it is. SAF is, after all, nothing but a greenwashing exercise by the aviation industry. And SAF isn’t financially viable either; the Ministry of Defence has just informed Parliament that SAF costs twice as much to produce as fossil aviation fuel. The Alfanar project was originally budgeted at £1bn, but it doubled in value during Ben Houchen’s failed mission to Saudi Arabia to rescue the SABIC Olefins 6 plant at Wilton
Clean Power
The next slide is largely a work of fiction. First of all, another map:
…then here’s the introduction
Fact-checking is important
Incinerators feature prominently on the map, although that word is, carefully, never used. Incinerators don’t produce ‘little-to-no’ greenhouse gas emissions. The slide describes the Suez incinerators at Haverton Hill, which burn the domestic waste of 10 of the 12 local authorities in the North East of England. This incinerator will largely be replaced by the Tees Valley ERF, if it gets built. The presentation describes the company’s other incinerator at Wilton as Sembcorp EfW for some reason. The company calls it Wilton 11. ‘Sembcorp EfW’ may be a greenwashing term to deflect from the actual purpose of Wilton 11, which is to burn the garbage of the entire population of the Liverpool City Region. Here’s a very recent example of how CCUS is cynically used to greenwash incinerator projects.
Disproportionate
So the Tees Valley burns the waste of 4 million people, in an area with a population of just over 700,000. Incinerators release more CO2 into the atmosphere per tonne burned than coal does. You can read about positive alternatives to incineration here. Chris Rowell’s description of this process as “low carbon” is grotesquely false.
False hope
Hartlepool nuclear power station gets a mention, but that’s closing in two years time. X-energy and Green Lizard are both speculative small modular reactor projects. Only one of these will be chosen by DESNZ, and it won’t start generating power until 2040, at the earliest. But Green Lizard is an oddity. It’s a partnership with US-based Westinghouse to build modular reactors, but its Stockton project consists of ‘Power-to-liquid manufacture using clean power to create green fuels and chemicals’. It’s difficult to see what this has got to do with nuclear power. We’ll await the next update in about three year’s time.
Biomass
MGT Biomass and Sembcorp Biomass (locally known as the Wilton 10 incinerator) burn “sustainably sourced” wood products, although MGT’s wood products are imported from abroad, which makes that claim dubious.
Wind Power
The Sofia and Dogger Bank Wind Farm Landings are about the only projects in this entire presentation that could accurately be described as making a positive contribution towards Net Zero. I’ve described here how they will convert offshore wind electricity to alternating current (A/C) from direct current (D/C). SeAH wind has developed a monopile factory, but the presentation fails to mention that the facility is in meltdown after losing its first major customer, as reported here.
A small player
Teesside Offshore Wind gets a mention. It’s capable of generating 62 MW of power, given the right weather conditions. Hartlepool Power Station, just on the other side of the river Tees generates 20 times as much electricity. And Hartlepool’s power is of the invaluable dispatchable type, that can be relied on 24/7. We’ll miss the electricity when it’s gone.
How did we do?
And so the slide show came to an end. Chris Rowell’s presentation is poorly researched, edited and presented. Most of the projects described can’t be described as ‘green’. They involve continued reliance on fossil fuel natural gas, either burning it in a power station or converting it to ‘blue’ H2, an expensive process which wastes 30% of the energy released.
Don’t do that – do this
The UK needs to invest in genuine renewables such as solar and wind energy systems, battery storage systems, electricity grid upgrades, heat pumps and insulation of buildings.
The dash for gas
Teesside’s continued reliance on imported fossil fuel natural gas represents a national security risk, as much of it will always need to be imported via the Strait of Hormuz. It also means forever high energy bills, and continued climate change catastrophe.
AI data centres
Chris Rowell’s work needs to be seen in the context of his boss Ben Houchen’s push for AI data centres at Teesworks in Redcar. In an interview with Liam Halligan in January 2026, Houchen stated his ambition is to build 3.2 GW of data centres at Teesworks by 2029. I’ve linked to this interview here (watch from 20:20). To put this in perspective, the entire UK data centre capacity as of January 2026 was 1.8 GW. I’ve written here about the impossibility of providing 3 GW of dispatchable electricity to Teesworks within three years, way beyond the capability of the local grid. Even if the grid could eventually be stepped up to match these ambitions, the dispatchable energy would need to be supplied by the building of gas-fired power stations. The alternative, new nuclear power stations, are at least 15 years away.
Goodbye to Net Zero 2040
If even a fraction of the proposed data centres were to be built at Redcar, the last remains of any carbon neutrality hopes would be shredded. And Teesside’s Net Zero 2040 would represent not so much a route to net zero as a road to oblivion.
Thanks to James Waterson for providing additional research for this article
Further Reading Chris Rowell Net Zero 2040 PowerPoint PDF
