The British oil and gas company Shell has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Chinese state-owned refiner Sinopec, as well as with Chinese steel company Baowu and Germany’s BASF, to explore the feasibility of developing an open-source carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) project in eastern China.
The project could potentially offer industrial companies in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River contractual opportunities to capture and store their CO2 emissions. 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. The captured CO2 could in turn be shipped to a receiving terminal in a CO2 carrier before being transported into storage sites both onshore and offshore through various pipelines.
In June 2022, Shell, alongside the US’ ExxonMobil and China's CNOOC entered a similar MoU to evaluate a CCUS project in an industrial park in the Guangdong province (southern China), that could potentially capture 10 MtCO2/year.
China is currently the world’s largest CO2 emitter with 12.4 GtCO2 emitted in 2021 (4.9 GtCO2 for the United States).