NEPIC Clean Growth Conference

On 20th June 2023 the North East Process Industrial Cluster (NEPIC) hosted their annual Clean Growth Conference at Hardwick hall, bringing together businesses, academia and the public sector from across the Tees Valley region to discuss net zero and emerging decarbonisation technologies.

There was a broad range of talks from power generation businesses discussing on-going major operations in the region, from BP’s “H2Teesside project”, presented by Francesco De Leonardis and Will Harrison-Cripps, P&G’s current efforts towards sustainable chemicals alongside the “Flue2Chem project”, presented by Dr Lindsey Fuller, to projects such as the Tees Valley Combined Authority’s net zero strategy, presented by Chris Rowell. The panel discussion before the lunch break fuelled an appetite for debate with Chris Beck (Arup), Dr Nashwan Dawood (NZIIC), Sarah Daun (Womble Bond Dickinson) and James Prime (Turner and Townsend), fielding questions from the audience on the barriers and opportunities for decarbonisation in the process sector.

The lunch break and coffee breaks fostered further discussions in the exhibition hall, where exhibitors were displaying their work and highlighting the on-going innovation occurring in the Teesside region. This allowed delegates to learn more about supply chains in the region and to interact with a hands-on supply chain mapping tool, created by NEPIC and Durham University.

The diversity of the presentations and topics covered in the panel discussion highlighted the scale of complexity when considering the challenge to decarbonise the chemical sector. The role that networks such as NEPIC can play, bringing together innovators from different industries to collaborate on a common goal, is vital for the chemical sector to decarbonise and the vision for a circular economy to become a reality. It was a pleasure to represent the CircularChem Centre for this year’s clean growth conference and I am sure the CircularChem Centre will be keen to participate in the next Clean Growth Conference in 2024.   

Written by Matthew Royle, Research Assistant