Carbon Engineering in regional carbon capture talks
11 April 2023
Canada-based clean energy company Carbon Engineering is in talks for carbon capture projects in the Middle East, according to its vice-president for Europe and the Middle East, Amy Ruddock.
“The Middle East makes a lot of sense for us,” she told MEED in an interview. “There’s a lot of storage and a lot of skill sets. The overlap with the oil and gas industry is immense.”
Carbon Engineering is focused on the commercialisation of so-called direct air capture technology that captures carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere.
The Canadian company is yet to partner with any companies in the Middle East, but Ruddock says the region is a promising location to deploy the direct air capture technologies that it has been developing.
Ruddock says the company is in talks with several potential partners in the region.
“We have a lot of conversations on the go,” she said. “I’m optimistic about our opportunities. We’re having big conversations.”
She added: “The people who will develop the storage will likely be oil and gas companies who have decades of experience.”
She added: “Our existing partners … have been storing carbon underground for decades in enhanced oil recovery and now they are using that expertise to look at whether it can be stored in saline aquifers.”
The Middle East makes sense for us. There’s a lot of storage and a lot of skill sets. The overlap with the oil and gas industry is immense
Amy Ruddock, Carbon Engineering
Carbon Engineering has a global agreement with 1PointFive, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum focused on carbon capture, utilisation and sequestration (CCUS).
“When we go to market, we are effectively looking for partners for 1PointFive to deploy the technology,” said Ruddock.
“In the Middle East, these companies are likely to be a national oil company or maybe renewable company. Masdar, for example, would be a good partner for us, but so would Adnoc. Both have the complementary skill sets that we are looking for.
“We are expecting that Cop28 will be momentum driving [for carbon capture technology adoption], not just for the UAE, but across the region.”
Texas plant
In 2022, construction began for the first large-scale commercial facility to use Carbon Engineering’s technology in the US.
Located in Texas and being deployed by 1PointFive, the plant is expected to capture up to 500,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, with the capability to scale up to one million tonnes a year.
Once fully operational, it will be the largest in the world – expected to surpass existing direct air capture facilities by a factor of a hundred.
Unlike capturing emissions from industrial flue stacks, the direct air capture technology licensed by Carbon Engineering removes carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere.
Aviation emissions
It is hoped that this technology will go some way to counteracting carbon dioxide emissions that are hard to capture at the source, such as emissions from aviation.
In November last year, Carbon Engineering received investments from Airbus and Air Canada to help fund the development of its carbon capture technologies.
In a statement, Carbon Engineering said the investment was worth “millions”, but the exact value was not disclosed.
Adnoc initiatives
On 28 March, Adnoc announced that it would deploy a direct air capture unit to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and install solar panels to power the operation.
Adnoc has already started drilling work in the UAE emirate of Fujairah as part of its pilot project to convert atmospheric carbon dioxide into rock formations.
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Nebius agrees Neom AI data centre capacity deal
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Saudi artificial intelligence (AI) company Humain and data centre developer DataVolt have signed a preliminary framework agreement with Netherlands-based AI cloud company Nebius for up to 50MW of data centre capacity at Oxagon, Neom’s industrial city on the kingdom's Red Sea coast.
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Riyadh awards $301m Sheikh Jaber Road contract
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The Royal Commission for Riyadh City (RCRC) has awarded an estimated SR1.13bn ($301m) contract to local firm Alomaier Trading & Contracting Company to upgrade a section of Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah Road in the capital.
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EGA’s Al-Taweelah restoration reaches 50% completion
22 October 2026
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The UAE’s Emirates Global Aluminium (EGA) has announced that half of the reduction cells at its Al-Taweelah smelter in Abu Dhabi, which sustained damage from Iranian attacks in late March, have been restarted.
On 28 March, drone and missile attacks by Iran on Khalifa Economic Zone Abu Dhabi (Kezad), where the smelter is located, led to an emergency shutdown of the facility and injured two EGA employees, who were later discharged from hospital.
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After being restarted, a reduction cell typically takes a week to stabilise and reach full production. Some hot metal is used to restart subsequent reduction cells, with the balance being delivered to EGA’s Al-Taweelah casthouse, to be cast into finished premium aluminium products.
Following the emergency shutdown, molten aluminium froze in every reduction cell at Al-Taweelah, leaving solid metal pads weighing up to 45 tonnes, which needed to be removed. Almost 80% of the reduction cells can then be restarted. The remaining reduction cells require repairs, potlining demolition and relining, depending on how long the reduction cells had been operating before the incident.
Periodically cutting out, repairing and relining reduction cells at the end of their operating life is routine in aluminium smelting. Compared to the normal rolling maintenance programme, EGA has more than tripled its capacity in order to safely repair and restart reduction cells at Al-Taweelah, by optimising workflows, adding equipment, strengthening employee capability and deploying industrial process innovations.
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About 1,000 employees are working on the restoration of hot metal production at the Al-Taweelah smelter, EGA said in a statement on 26 August.
During the restoration, EGA has accelerated the deployment of a technology pilot at Al-Taweelah that would otherwise have required operating reduction cells to be shut down. The pilot E40 upgrades to 13 DX technology reduction cells will be used to prove the performance of the technology before industrialisation across all 808 DX technology cells at Al-Taweelah.
If applied to all DX reduction cells, EGA’s E40 technology has the potential to increase hot metal production by 67,000 tonnes a year (t/y).
EGA’s Al-Taweelah alumina refinery is located next to the Al-Taweelah smelter.
Alumina is the feedstock for aluminium smelters. It is transferred to storage and then into the smelter by a system of conveyor belts.
The Al-Taweelah alumina refinery continues to produce alumina at approximately 50% capacity, EGA said. While the alumina refinery is technically ready to ramp-up further, timing will be based on supply chain dynamics and the optimisation of EGA’s alumina sourcing strategy.
The company announced on 10 July that it had restarted alumina production at its main refinery in Al-Taweelah, adding at the time that it expected to have the technical capability to ramp up to full alumina production by the end of this year.
The Al-Taweelah alumina refinery began production in 2019 and has a nameplate capacity of 2 million t/y.
EGA’s Al-Taweelah smelter consists of 1,262 reduction cells and produced 1.6 million tonnes of cast metal in 2025.
The Al-Taweelah alumina refinery produced 2.4 million t/y of alumina in 2025, and met 46% of EGA’s alumina needs.
EGA also said in July that its site in the Jebel Ali area of Dubai is continuing aluminium production at full capacity. Average daily inbound deliveries of all major raw materials exceed EGA’s requirements to maintain metal production at Jebel Ali and meet the demands of restoration at Al-Taweelah, with raw material stocks in the UAE increasing.
Separately, the ramp-up of production at EGA’s new Al-Taweelah recycling plant remains on track, with full production expected by late in the fourth quarter of this year.
EGA’s recycling plants in the US and Germany, meanwhile, have continued production throughout 2026.
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