BOC commissions Teesside CO2 plant without publishing capacity

By Olivia Hart

BOC has commissioned a Teesside CO2 capture and purification plant without disclosing its annual capacity; the disclosed £30 million (about $40 million) investment belongs to the hydrogen host plant, opened in 2002.

BOC says the new unit takes raw carbon dioxide waste streams directly from its primary hydrogen production plant at North Tees and purifies them to food, beverage and healthcare quality standards. It adds commissioned capacity to the company’s domestic production of industrial- and food-grade CO2.

The scale remains the useful missing number. Without annual throughput, customers and policymakers cannot test how much imported supply the unit can displace or how much of BOC’s stated resilience case it represents.

What does the Teesside facility process?

The capture line has a defined industrial feedstock. BOC’s primary hydrogen plant at North Tees opened in 2002 following the £30 million (about $40 million) capital investment. The carbon facility draws raw CO2 directly from that operating plant rather than from a proposed emissions source.

BOC has not disclosed a separate capital cost for the carbon unit or its annual capture capacity. The company declined to give the capacity figure for commercial reasons. Those omissions prevent a straightforward comparison between investment and recovered tonnes.

Takeaway: BOC has built a recovery route for CO2 from an operating hydrogen plant, but has not shown how much gas the route can carry.

How does the plant fit BOC’s UK network?

The Manchester asset entered commercial operation in 2017, making it BOC’s first UK purification asset. BOC says it captures and refines raw, bio-based CO2 generated as a byproduct of Cargill’s wheat fermentation operations. Teesside adds a second named purification location and a different feedstock.

The commissioning therefore broadens BOC’s national merchant carbon network across the UK. BOC also places the project within broader UK industrial supply-chain initiatives aimed at securing domestic merchant gas resources for critical manufacturing, food processing and medical sectors.

Takeaway: The two named operating assets connect wheat fermentation in Manchester with hydrogen production in Teesside inside BOC’s UK merchant network.

Why is the capacity figure missing?

BOC declined to disclose the Teesside plant’s specific annual capture capacity for commercial reasons. The facility is built and commissioned, but its contribution to domestic supply cannot yet be calculated.

Jenni Allen, Executive Director at BOC, said: “By increasing domestic capacity, the new plant helps reduce reliance on CO2 imports and mitigates the impact of industry outages, seasonal shortages and market disruptions.”

She added: “Reliable CO2 supply is essential to many industries that people depend on every day.”

Allen described scaling domestic recovery infrastructure as essential to insulating UK manufacturing sectors from global market volatility and supply shortfalls. The announcement supplies no import-substitution target, output figure or outage-response metric. BOC’s resilience argument is clear as strategy, but unmeasured as performance.

Takeaway: BOC says domestic capacity can reduce import exposure, but the missing throughput figure leaves that promise untested.

What did the government say?

Speaking at the opening, UK Minister for Reindustrialisation Blair McDougall said localized carbon recovery facilities strengthen regional industrial resilience while preserving skilled jobs across manufacturing hubs in North East England. His emphasis was on industrial continuity and employment, not only on carbon capture as an environmental process.

BOC’s announcement places the commissioning within broader UK industrial supply-chain initiatives to secure domestic merchant gas for critical manufacturing, food processing and medical sectors. It names no specific program, funding amount or regulatory deadline.

Takeaway: For government, the project supports regional resilience and skilled jobs; for BOC, it supports domestic merchant supply.

What happens next?

No regulatory deadline or further expansion schedule accompanied the commissioning announcement. The next test is operational: whether North Tees can deliver additional purified CO2 as the market faces industry outages and seasonal shortages. Those are the supply risks BOC says the plant helps mitigate.

Takeaway: The decisive market milestone is sustained, measurable domestic supply during normal periods and shortages; without annual capacity or import data, the market cannot calculate BOC’s contribution.