Veolia Wins CO2 Units Deal for UK Carbon Capture Plant

French environmental services group Veolia has won a contract to supply equipment for Protos, a planned carbon capture plant in Cheshire that is set to be the UK’s first full-scale carbon capture project at an energy-from-waste site. Veolia announced the contract on 27 October and called it its entry into the full-scale carbon capture market.

The plant aims to capture about 370,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year once it starts operating in mid-2029. Those figures are targets: the capture plant is still to be built.

In brief

Veolia will design and supply two units that clean and dry captured CO2 before it is piped away for storage.
The CO2 will come from Encyclis’s Protos energy-from-waste facility near Ellesmere Port and be stored under Liverpool Bay through the HyNet North West network.
The UK government agreed the project’s commercial terms with Encyclis in September 2025.

What Veolia is supplying

Veolia’s customer is Kanadevia Inova, the engineering, procurement and construction contractor for the capture plant. Veolia will deliver two CO2 purification and dehydration units, which strip impurities and water from the captured gas so it meets the purity standards for pipeline transport and long-term storage underground.

Veolia says its units are compact and modular, designed to fit inside the limited space of the Protos building. It has not disclosed the value of the contract.

Anne Le Guennec, chief executive of Veolia’s water technology activities, said the project “establishes Veolia at the forefront of industrial decarbonization” and that Veolia has “active carbon capture projects across Europe and the US”.

How Protos is meant to work

Protos burns non-recyclable rubbish that would otherwise go to landfill. Veolia says it will process up to 500,000 tonnes of waste a year and generate up to 49.9 megawatts of electricity for the grid.

The capture plant will take flue gas from the facility and remove the CO2. The gas will then travel through the HyNet North West pipeline network, which Encyclis says is operated by Eni, to depleted gas reservoirs beneath Liverpool Bay. Veolia says the 370,000 tonnes a year is equivalent to taking about 200,000 petrol cars off the road.

Encyclis, which owns the site, reached agreement with the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero on the commercial framework in September 2025. It said the project forms part of the government’s £21.7bn commitment to carbon capture and could create up to 500 construction jobs. Energy minister Michael Shanks said at the time that the project was “creating hundreds of skilled jobs and new opportunities for workers in the North West”.

Encyclis’s announcement did not mention Veolia, so the contract rests on Veolia’s own statement.

The removal claim depends on what is in the bin

Veolia says Protos will become a “negative emitter”, meaning it would remove more CO2 from the atmosphere than it adds. That claim hangs on the make-up of the waste. Encyclis says about half of the captured CO2 is biogenic, from materials such as food, paper and wood that absorbed carbon as they grew. Storing that share counts as a removal. The other half comes largely from fossil-based materials such as plastics, so capturing it avoids new emissions rather than removing old ones.

Whether the plant ends up net negative will depend on how much of its CO2 it actually captures once running, and on what goes into the furnace over years. Encyclis has said revenue from carbon removal credits will be paid back to the government, so the public has a direct stake in that number.

There is also a chain of dependencies. Protos needs the HyNet pipeline and the Liverpool Bay store to be ready, and the waste plant itself was still being commissioned when Encyclis announced the deal with government. Until 2029, the 370,000 tonnes is a design figure.

The contract is still a useful signal. It shows the supply chain for UK carbon capture is now placing equipment orders, not just signing framework agreements. Much of TSN’s recent clean-energy coverage has been at lab scale, such as a carbon membrane two nanometres thick and AI-guided searches for hydrogen catalysts. Protos is a test at industrial scale, alongside other energy projects such as Endurance Energy’s seafloor geothermal trial and Pohang’s centre for grading used EV batteries.