BP appoints new Vice President for hydrogen and CCS in the UK

That means that from the CEO down to the newest recruit straight out of college the skill levels are the best in the business and, from the company ethos, collaborations between departments, representing your brand and doing your job every day, nothing is diluted.

When each cog is perfectly in place like that, the engine purrs and you can get maximum performance every time the key needs to be turned – but it also means that there is a seamless transition because everywhere you look, there is a team of the right people performing at the highest level.

That was how it seemed to me when I met Chris Daykin at bp’s office at the Wilton Centre, just a few miles from the site where he will become part of Teesside’s future.

As the company’s new VP for Hydrogen & CCS in the UK, Chris takes over from Andy Lane, who was one of the driving forces within the company behind plans for NZT Power, a gas-fired power station with carbon capture and storage.

It was only in December that bp and its partners confirmed that they had reached financial close for NZT Power and the Northern Endurance Partnership (NEP), which will provide the CO2 transport and storage system to the East Coast Cluster and that lNZT Power will link in to. So now the innovation and submission and years of planning move into the execution phase.

Chris Daykin is looking forward to seeing both projects built.

The role seems tailor-made, returning him to the spot where his metallurgy work meant visits to the blast furnace at Redcar in the 1990s.

‘I joined bp in 1998, a few years after the Redcar visits,’ he tells me. ‘Initially I was working in the upstream as a drilling engineer, then went offshore quite quickly after that and then the next ten years or so was building my experience with more engineering roles around the bp portfolio.

‘I have had the opportunity and privilege to work in a lot of different places, from Algeria to Angola and Aberdeen before moving into operations and being able to be part of a team in Senegal, Mauritania and over into Iraq.’

It was a constant rise through 26 years of roles that would establish his reputation in engineering, operations and then management where his leadership skills were honed and put to their best use.

At that stage, Chris had the opportunity to work in the low carbon space within bp.

‘I moved into offshore wind, which built on some skills and also gave me the opportunity to learn some new ones,” he says.

‘I did that for about three years, working between Oslo and New York, and while a lot of what we do is now very familiar to us, delivering carbon capture as a service to others is new for both us and for the whole industry.’

It seems clear from that impressive record that one of Chris’ key strengths is that he loves to lead a project.

‘I think that’s down to a combination of different things – a lot of those projects have been joint ventures, and as you look at our portfolio now, particularly in the low carbon space, they’re predominantly JVs because that gives us the opportunity to work with different partners and bring the knowledge in from them.

‘Part of what I bring to the role is my joint venture experience - being able to understand what it takes to get these things going from something on paper to something that’s actually tangible and really being delivered. Now it’s about operationalising and actually making these things real.

‘I enjoy the delivery aspect of it, and with that comes a responsibility. Delivering these projects safely is absolutely paramount to their success and remains our number one priority. These projects are vital in terms of helping us support the UK and its energy transition, and in contributing to the Teesside economy and community more broadly.’

That formative time spent at the steelworks and a job interview at ICI soon after means he has a connection with this area – he gets Teesside and that will be so important as he starts to help drive a transformation here.

‘For me, it’s a privilege to be part of that opportunity to reshape what was here,’ he tells me.

‘The region attracted me from when I first came here because it had such great industry with the potential for fantastic careers – so wouldn’t it be great to be able to be part of recreating that now with this new vision for lower carbon energy and so many opportunities that will bring for the youngsters.“One of the challenges I had growing up was that I didn’t have those opportunities locally and I had to move away, it was almost a necessity. But what we’re creating here is the ability to give roles to existing skilled people but also for youngsters coming out of school to stay in the region and have really interesting, innovative, technical roles in their local area.

‘It’s something that I’m quite passionate about because I didn’t have that, but it brings its own challenges from an industry perspective as well as from a project perspective.

‘To tackle those challenges, we’re taking action in a number of areas – including the work we’re doing with Redcar and Cleveland College – to make sure there is the potential to deliver a number of roles locally and I think that the work we’re doing with schools in the STEM space, along with our joint venture partners, is really helping to deliver that longer wavelength pipeline.

‘The projects are going to require thousands of people on site during the construction phase so it is something that we are very focussed on.

‘We also need to phase the activity because we don’t want a huge peak. The projects that we’re delivering in the short term will bring lots of activity at NZT Power, on NEP and on H2Teesside, and we’re actually seeing that being phased a little bit so that we make sure that we deliver a peak that is slightly lower but sustainable and that’s good in two ways.

‘It allows the demand challenge to be addressed but it also means that those roles have a significantly longer profile which provides longevity as we manage the builds at the best pace.’

The whole future that is being written here has been so many years in the making that the attention it has attracted has followed those same phases Chris talks about. It is the only thing people talk about for a few weeks, then it becomes a background conversation, then it surges back again as each stage is reached and the bigger picture is revealed.

With construction for the projects expected to start from mid-2025 soon we should be able to use that inspiring phrase of ‘steel in the ground’, with roads being laid, infrastructure being put in for construction teams, earthmovers starting up, surveyors, welders, crane operators, apprentices – and hydrogen and CCS VPs – all moving into top gear as some of the most ambitious and complex energy projects anyone has ever seen start to take shape just a few minutes down the road from his new office.

Chris says: ‘The big milestones were NZT Power and NEP reaching that financial close position at the end of the year, and the government announcement of the £21.7billion to support that.

‘Very quickly after that the projects actually moved into the engineering stage and I saw some pictures the other day of the first steel that’s coming through, which will go to Hartlepool for Liberty to be worked into the pipeline. So that is already being manufactured now, which is an exciting moment, and we expect to see activity on the ground from around the middle of the year.’

On the ground, an essential support network starts with Chris’ own team and grows into the partner companies they will be working with. With so many people to co-ordinate, it is clear why bp turned to Chris to bring it all together.

Having all of that ‘scaffolding’ supporting this work is clearly important for him, and with the Teesside projects in particular it has been a major achievement to bring a national and global focus to our region and then persuade those bringing such an intense spotlight on us that this place really can become globally significant once again.

‘I have always found, throughout my career, that collaboration is absolutely key,’ he says.

‘That involves our partners, the government and our supply chain because these are complicated infrastructure projects that no one company or one individual can make or break. This is about how we work together effectively so collaboration is key. We recognise that one crucial element that has helped us get so far is the tremendous support of the government – independent of party as well because we’ve seen strong support for these projects irrespective of who’s in office and we see that continuing.

‘We’ve worked very closely with the various departments for many years but particularly over the last year or so to get the business models in place for NZT Power and for NEP and we’ve also agreed a statement of principles for H2Teesside as well.

‘I would say the support we’re seeing is unique to the UK because government has been very skilled in how they’ve done this, by basically providing a framework which gives us as developers the ability to progress projects. Such business models help mitigate the risk and that’s what is unique here.

‘What we are doing on Teesside involves co-ordinating multiple different projects to come together on a similar timeline because when you link them together and give them a date, that’s when the CO2 has got to come into the system.

‘Thankfully, I’ve got a very strong team which can be broken into various different parts, so that’s where all of this collaboration really begins.

‘There’s a big group on engineering which will move into the construction and delivery, then a project delivery group and a group that looks after what will become our operations team with two or three years of construction work from mid-2025 through to 2028.

‘Then we have a commercial team that helps with the negotiations and leads those talks with key stakeholders on behalf of the joint venture companies,

‘So mine is very much a leadership role to make sure that all of these pieces fit together and each of these separate teams delivers what the projects need.’

It is an impressive workload and responsibility, and those on Teesside who are not yet familiar with Chris and his work will soon see plenty of both.

He has his own strategies and methods and the way he approaches each role will be precisely tailor-made, but always built upon all that history with bp. He knows the business well, what it needs and what he can do to help it complete the most impactful projects the sector has ever seen.

‘It’s what I’ve done throughout my career,’ he says.

‘Initially you’re in that delivery organisation and then you move up and you understand how the different parts fit together. To be effective in these senior leadership roles I think you need to understand all those different elements because you need to make sure that everyone is supporting everyone else in the delivery.

‘We bring an ability to bring these vast projects together and we will be able to hopefully demonstrate how well we do that through delivery over the next two or three years.’

But for Chris, it is never just a matter of getting through a workload. He needs to enjoy what he does and be inspired by it. For him, that particularly means the collaboration side and all the interactions with partners and stakeholders. Even with all of his depth of experience, he knows you can always learn something new when you work alongside different companies. They have different ways of doing things and it allows everyone involved to bring the best out of each other and see clearly what everyone else has to offer.

‘I’ve always done the things that I enjoy and I think if you’re going to be really successful at something you’ve got to enjoy it – you’ve got to have a passion for it because that’s when you really perform,’ he says.

‘When I was at school I never really knew what I wanted to do. I was good at Maths and Physics and I continued to do those things that I enjoyed and that led me into engineering and that’s always been the same throughout my career – if you’re good at something you perform and that leads to the next opportunity.

‘I haven’t necessarily sought opportunities, they’ve come to me as a result of being able to deliver and I would say my team wouldn’t have been able to deliver what they’ve done in the last six months if they didn’t have that passion and personal commitment.

‘It’s taken a huge amount of effort from all the teams in one of the most complex things I’ve ever worked on in the last 30 years.’

Needless to say, he’ll stay until the job is done and make sure every stage is a model of how it should be done. Teessiders, particularly those from our Steel Age, will relate to that level of commitment – don’t just make it, make it the very best there is.

‘I’m really keen to start getting out on the site, seeing construction and understanding how the teams are getting the work done to make sure we can provide the support they need to deliver safely and effectively,’ he says.

‘I love going out and hearing from them firsthand because often there are things that they’re struggling with that we can potentially solve quite quickly if we know about them early on – and the best way to do that is towork with them on-site.’

Chris already has a crystal clear vision of what will make the site successful.

‘First and foremost, of course, we need to deliver it safely. That will always come first. We’re going to have a lot of people on site and so making sure everyone goes home at the end of every day in the same condition as they came here is absolutely essential to me.

‘Along these lines, it’s also about creating a culture of carefor each other. In my experience the people that really know what is going on are the people on the frontline delivering and so it’s those people that will spot issues or be able to identify problems and creating that culture is something I’m personally really passionate about.

‘Second to that is delivering the project on schedule and in a cost-effective way as we said we would do from the start. We need to get these things delivered if we’re going to help towards the government’s Clean Power ambition.

‘The third goal is delivering for the community and creating those opportunities for businesses so that we can give both existing skilled workers the opportunities but also new school leavers, because we want this to continue to be a big part of the community. The CCS network that will facilitate NZT Power and H2 Teesside will also help facilitate the decarbonisation of existing industry as well as potentially bringing new businesses so it becomes the backbone of the whole project.

‘The hydrogen network will provide another opportunity for industry to decarbonise whether it’s through fuel switching or through using hydrogen as a feedstock so you’ve got two networks there which almost form the core of regenerating the site and I think the facility that we’ll end up with at the end of this will create that opportunity for more industry to come back to Teesside, which would be so rewarding for us all.

‘That’s what drives me every day – being here to help deliver all of those elements.’

The transformation started a long time ago, but bp knew something special was happening when the projects held an event to invite local businesses to see where they could participate. More than 200 businesses saw the same potential and came along, and the links started to form that now make up the vital supply chain that bonds everything together.

NZT Power and NEP will help change the way we consume energy, and to get there bp along with its partners and the shareholders in those projects, aims to build a seamless matrix of skills and partnerships that will change the way projects on this scale are completed.