There’s a proposal working its way through the planning system at the moment that deserves more attention from a business continuity perspective than it’s currently getting. Peak Cluster is a carbon capture and storage scheme that would take CO2 from cement and lime works in Derbyshire and Staffordshire and move it 120-odd miles by pipeline, through Cheshire, out to the Wirral, and under the Irish Sea for permanent storage. It’s been designated a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project, which means the final decision rests with the Secretary of State rather than local councils, and it’s already generated a serious amount of local opposition, including formal objections from Wirral and Derbyshire councils and a petition running into the tens of thousands of signatures.
I live close enough to the proposed route that I’ve been following this one more closely than most. And most of what’s being said publicly about it is about landscape, farmland, house building, wildlife corridors and green belt. All legitimate concerns. But almost none of the coverage is asking the question that matters most to the organisations sitting along that corridor: what actually happens, operationally, if this pipeline fails?
This is not the same risk profile as a gas leak
It’s tempting to file a CO2 pipeline under the same mental category as a gas main, and that’s a mistake. CO2 is colourless and odourless, so there’s no smell to warn people something is wrong, unlike natural gas which is deliberately odorised for exactly that reason. It’s also considerably denser than air, so a release doesn’t disperse upward and thin out the way most people instinctively expect a gas leak to behave. It sinks, and it pools, in dips, cellars, and low-lying ground, which happens to describe a fair amount of the terrain this pipeline would cross.
And because it’s transported at high pressure, a rupture isn’t a slow seep you can smell and walk away from. It’s a rapid, forceful release that can produce a fast-moving, ground-hugging cloud with very little warning.
We already have a real-world example of what this looks like in practice. In 2020, a CO2 pipeline ruptured near Satartia, Mississippi. A dense cloud of gas settled over the town, dozens of people were hospitalised, and emergency vehicles simply stopped working as they drove into the higher-concentration areas, because petrol and diesel engines need oxygen to run, and the air in that cloud didn’t have enough of it. People who tried to drive away from the danger found themselves stranded in the middle of it.
That single detail should reshape how anyone near this route thinks about evacuation planning. “Get in the car and drive” is the default instruction in most emergency plans. It may not work here.
Cheshire East already knows this is different
It’s worth noting that Cheshire East Council, in its capacity as a host authority for the scheme, has already flagged this in an officers’ report to its corporate policy committee. Councillors themselves are split on the wider project. Some have welcomed it and see no viable alternative to meeting decarbonisation targets; a proposal to send the scheme to full Council for a wider debate was actually voted down at the same meeting. But the officers’ own report is explicit, regardless of where individual members land on the project overall, that transporting liquefied CO2 by pipeline is still a relatively new proposition in the UK, and that this itself raises the perceived level of risk to the local community, alongside specific concerns about the health impacts of potential leakage or rupture.
Derbyshire County Council went further still. In March, councillors voted by a majority to formally oppose the scheme, following a motion that set out the case in blunter terms: that CO2 is an asphyxiant, that parts of the route cross ground considered unstable, and that the Satartia rupture is a precedent worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as a one-off. The motion pointed out that a local high school and a supermarket sit directly beneath the proposed route, and argued that a rupture near either could fill the surrounding area with concentrations well above what’s considered fatal. Not every councillor agreed. One defended the scheme on economic grounds and pushed back on how the risk had been characterised. But an elected authority, not a campaign group, looked at this proposal and voted to oppose it specifically on safety grounds, which is a different order of concern to a report simply asking for more work before anyone signs off.
Host authorities like Cheshire East will, in time, need emergency plans that reflect this hazard properly, and that’s a genuinely difficult job. A CO2 release doesn’t behave like the incidents local Category 1 responders train for most often. The exclusion zone could be larger, the detection lag longer, and the equipment needed to safely enter an affected area, from breathing apparatus to vehicles capable of running in an oxygen-depleted atmosphere, isn’t standard fire and ambulance service kit. Tellingly, the cost discussion at the Cheshire East committee so far has been almost entirely about the planning process itself, officer time, consultation resource, submissions to the Planning Inspectorate, rather than what it would actually cost to build that emergency response capability. That’s understandable this early on, but it’s also exactly why none of it is set up overnight, and none of it should be waited for by the businesses who’d actually be affected.
What this means for the organisations in the corridor
It’s worth putting this in some context first. Established COMAH sites, the fixed installations that handle hazardous substances above the regulatory threshold, have had decades to get public information and emergency response right. Residents living near a site like that typically know what the siren means, what to do when it sounds, and where to shelter, and nearby schools often build it into their own drills. That’s taken a long time to get right, and it’s a genuine achievement. Even so, it’s never been entirely clear to me what a cyclist or a pedestrian passing through for the first time, with no local knowledge and no history of the site, is actually supposed to do if the siren goes off while they’re on the road.
Peak Cluster is a different scale of problem again. This isn’t one fixed site with an established exclusion zone and a settled communication routine built up over years. It’s over a hundred miles of buried high-pressure pipeline, in effect a COMAH-grade hazard running continuously through dozens of communities, farms, schools and businesses that have never had reason to think of themselves as sitting next to a major hazard site before. Building that same level of public awareness and readiness along an entire corridor, rather than around a single gate, is a genuinely different undertaking, and it isn’t obvious anyone has fully grappled with what that takes yet.
If your business, school, farm, or public building sits anywhere near this route, the interesting continuity questions aren’t really about the pipeline itself. They’re about what an exclusion zone does to your ability to operate, and this is where I think a lot of existing continuity plans would come up short.
Start with access. CO2 doesn’t damage a building or its equipment the way fire or flood does. The problem is that your people may simply not be able to get to it. If your server room, your main office, or any critical piece of on-site kit needs a person physically present to keep it running, and that person can’t cross the exclusion boundary, you have a continuity problem that has nothing to do with the technology itself and everything to do with where it lives.
Then there’s a harder question sitting underneath all of this: if an alert came through, would you actually want your building evacuated? Most fire and general emergency plans default to evacuation almost automatically, and for fire that’s the right instinct. For a dense, ground-hugging, invisible gas, it may not be. The official public guidance for chemical incidents in the UK is generally to shelter rather than evacuate, known as “go in, stay in, tune in”: get indoors, move upstairs and away from cellars and ground-floor spaces, close doors, windows and vents, and wait for further instruction rather than moving through a plume you can’t see or smell to get away from it. Given CO2 sinks and pools at ground level, moving people upstairs and away from external walls could plausibly do more to protect them than marching them out to a car park and a fleet of vehicles that may not start.
That’s not a settled answer, though, and it’s worth being honest about the questions it raises rather than pretending they’re simple. Sheltering in place only helps if the building is at least reasonably sealable, and most offices, schools and retail units aren’t designed with that in mind. It also depends on knowing how long to shelter for, which requires reliable communication with the people inside for what could be an extended period, and someone able to make and update that call as conditions change. For a school, that’s a decision about pupils who can’t act on their own judgement. For a shop or office, it’s a decision about customers and staff who’ve never been briefed on any of this and won’t necessarily follow an instruction to stay put when their instinct is to leave. None of that has an off-the-shelf answer, but it’s a conversation worth having with your own emergency planning now, rather than defaulting unthinkingly to the evacuation drill you already have on file.
Then there’s the building itself, separate from the evacuate-or-shelter question. Because CO2 travels at ground level and can arrive without warning, anywhere drawing in outside air is exposed, whether or not it sits directly on the pipeline route. Shutting down external air intake needs to be a defined, rehearsed action for any building management system in the vicinity, triggered on alert rather than worked out on the day.
Power is worth a hard look too, and not only in terms of how long a UPS lasts. Most standby generators run on diesel or petrol, and those engines need oxygen to combust fuel in exactly the same way a car engine does. If the same oxygen-depleted conditions that stall vehicles in a CO2 cloud reach a generator’s air intake, there’s a real question over whether it would start at all, let alone keep running for the duration of the incident. It’s worth asking your own supplier directly rather than assuming a generator is a like-for-like substitute for mains power in this specific scenario. On-site systems, from access control and CCTV to phones and servers, are only as resilient as the backup power behind them, and it’s worth knowing honestly how long that lasts and what it actually covers, generator caveats included.
And if evacuation is the right call, whether from the start or partway through as conditions change, an evacuated building is an unattended one. Remote monitoring, alarms and access control that don’t depend on someone being on site to check them become the only thing standing between a safe evacuation and a break-in on top of it.
The real lesson here isn’t about pipelines
Every one of those points comes back to the same underlying issue, which is single-site dependency. An organisation that can shift its people, systems and operations away from one physical location without missing a beat treats a CO2 exclusion zone as a serious inconvenience. An organisation whose entire operation lives in one building on that corridor treats it as an existential threat. The pipeline is simply the thing that would expose a vulnerability that was already there.
Whatever you think of Peak Cluster as a piece of infrastructure policy, and I have my own views on that, the debate about whether it should go ahead is largely out of the hands of the organisations who’d be affected by it. What isn’t out of their hands is whether they’ve actually tested what a several-hour, several-hundred-metre exclusion zone would do to their operation, their people, and their systems. That work doesn’t need to wait for a planning decision. It’s worth starting now.
