This paper is devoted to the investigation of the essential approximate point spectrum and the essential defect spectrum of a 2 × 2 block operator matrix on a product of Banach spaces. The obtained results are applied to a two-group transport operators with general boundary conditions in the Banach space Lp([−a, a] × [−1, 1]) × Lp([−a, a] × [−1, 1]), a > 0, p ≥ 1.