Anglo-Dutch IOC Shell has inked an MoU with China’s state-owned petroleum and chemical company Sinopec, steel and iron manufacturer Baowu, and German multinational chemical company BASF to assess the possibility of developing an open-source CCUS project in the East China region, Shell announced on 4 November.

If successful, it will be China’s first large-scale open-source CCUS project with a potential capacity of tens of million tonnes of CO2 per year.

“Carbon capture and storage (CCS) offers a way to reduce emissions in hard-to-abate sectors and we are actively exploring such opportunities with our partners,” Huibert Vigeveno, Shell’s Downstream Director, said. “This project is also in line with Shell’s strategic approach to provide decarbonisation solutions to individual market sectors, as well as our ambition of having access to at least 25 million tonnes a year of CCS capacity by 2035.”

An open-source project could potentially open contractual opportunities for industrial companies in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River to capture and store their CO2 emissions. 

The companies also plan to study technical solutions to create a commercial model for the project and explore the possibility of establishing high-integrity and verified low-carbon product supply chains. In addition, the parties will propose enabling policies.