An ambitious focus on delivering the future skills to meet net zero targets saw Redcar and Cleveland College take centre stage at the CCUS 2025 conference in London.
Head of construction, engineering and service industries, Emma Booth, joined a panel of industry experts to discuss the vital role education and training have to play in supporting the scale-up of carbon capture utilisation and storage.
“The key message was very much around the value of forging effective collaboration between employers, education and training providers – something that, along with our employer partners, we do exceptionally well here at the college,” said Emma.
As a representative voice for further education, she was able to draw on the many projects already being successfully delivered at the college and in the Tees Valley, to evidence the true value of such collaborative efforts.
Emma was joined on stage by operations manager, low carbon, at Bechtel, George Whittaker, independent consultant, Andy Lane, and panel chair, Max Musing, UK senior policy officer from the CCSA.
She said: “It was fantastic to be invited to speak from a further education and training perspective and to be able to showcase the college’s work as an exemplar to an audience of some 200 delegates comprising many multi-national organisations.”
Initiatives such as the development of the Clean Energy Education Hub have proven a clear indication of the college’s intent, as part of the wider Education Training Collective (Etc.), to develop a workforce ready to meet current and future skill needs.
The Teesside Clean Energy Technician scholarship, backed by bp, has already seen some 40 young people developing the engineering skills that could see them go on to skilled careers in the renewable and low carbon industries.
And, just this week, the college launched its new hydrogen refuelling training facility with hydrogen hub transport funding secured from the Tees Valley Mayor and Combined Authority and supplied by Hydrasun, along with four mobile units.
Emma said: “At the conference panel event a lot of the questions were around how to engage with education providers, funding and diversity. It was great to see employers so engaged and wanting to better understand and tackle some of these challenges.
“Industry can often expect a readymade workforce, but the current supply chain doesn’t have the numbers to support that.
“It takes employer engagement, working closely with education and training providers, backing up the theory with real industry expertise, and providing opportunities for these young people to ultimately get a first foot on the ladder, to feed that talent pipeline.”
The CCUS 2025: Real Projects, Real Impact, Delivering Net Zero is the Carbon Capture and Storage Association’s (CCSA) flagship UK conference. The two-day event took place at the QEII Conference Centre in Westminster with presentations and workshops around the deployment of carbon capture, utilisation and storage technologies.
