Net Zero Teesside: Lessons from actors and networks in industrial decarbonization projects

Kyle S Herman, Marfuga Iskandarova and Benjamin Sovacool

University of Sussex, UK

This paper explores the Teesside industrial cluster, which is the most geographically confined of six identified by the UK government’s industrial decarbonization framework. Teesside presents an interesting case study for industrial decarbonization. Due to the nature of the cluster—which is spatially concentrated with a diverse range of industrial companies including petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, steel, electricity, oil refining, led by domestic and multinational corporations—a plurality of private and public actors have bounded together, through Net Zero Teesside, to reimagine what a low-carbon industrial future could be. Technologies to be deployed are carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS), blue and green hydrogen, and renewable energy, with 7 major projects already going forward. Further, it has substantial local, regional, and central government support, and a long history of industry in the area. We investigate Teesside’s attempt to redirect away heavily carbon emitting industry towards carbon-neutral industry for the 21st century by leveraging two theories—the Sociology of Expectations and Discourse Theory—to uncover the roles of key actors, especially those that are led by local or regional authorities. We triangulate with original interview data, site visits, and document analyses. We find that Teesside’s industrial decarbonization approach has significant benefits but also a few major flaws—specifically, that it is centred on several emerging technologies and multinational corporations, and this means that a project failure would have negative spillovers effects on other projects. Finally, we outline key challenges which can be applied to similarly industrial clusters undergoing decarbonization in other industrial clusters.