A new report by the Carbon Trust explores the potential of fitting carbon capture technology to energy from waste plants, which could reduce the UK’s CO2 emissions by up to 20% by 2050.
Energy from waste (EfW) plants are facilities that burn residual waste that cannot be recycled or reused to produce steam, which then drives turbines to generate electricity or heat. EfW plants play an important role in the UK’s waste management system, diverting millions of tonnes of waste from landfills and providing low-carbon energy.
Energy-from-Waste (EfW) facilities, while contributing to energy generation, also release carbon dioxide (CO2), a significant greenhouse gas that exacerbates climate change. Presently, EfW plants in the United Kingdom are responsible for approximately 11 million tonnes of CO2 emissions annually. Moreover, with new and upcoming energy projects, there could be an additional emission of around 9 million tonnes of CO2 each year. Lowering these CO2 emissions is crucial for the UK's transition to low carbon energy and is essential in achieving the nation's goal of net zero emissions by the year 2050.
One way to reduce the emissions from EfW plants is to fit them with Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) equipment. CCUS is a technology that captures CO2 from industrial sources and either stores it underground or uses it for other purposes, such as enhanced oil recovery, synthetic fuels, or building materials. CCUS significantly improves the sustainability of EfW facilities and can mitigate many of the environmental issues that threaten the long-term viability of EfW in the UK, such as air quality, landfill diversion, and resource efficiency.
This also creates a source of negative emissions, which are needed to compensate for the residual emissions from hard-to-decarbonize sectors, such as aviation and agriculture.
Many EfW plants are geographically well located for CCUS, being in industrial clusters near to accessible CO2 storage locations, such as depleted oil and gas fields or saline aquifers. A significant proportion of the UK’s EfW fleet is relatively new compared to other industrial facilities, and they therefore have a long life ahead of them in which to benefit from a CCUS retrofit investment.
On a lowest system transition cost basis, fitting CCUS to EfW plants could lead to 20% of all captured CO2 in the UK being derived from EfW plants by 2050, with a corresponding 20% overall increase in CO2 being captured in the same timeframe compared with the case without EfW-CCUS being available.
The report, commissioned by Viridor, Cory and SSE Thermal, three of the UK’s leading EfW operators, mentions three examples of EfW plants that are looking to install CCUS technology: Viridor’s Runcorn CCS Project, Cory’s Belvedere CCS Project, and SSE Thermal’s Ferrybridge Multifuel 2 CCS Project. These projects are part of the UK Government’s industrial carbon capture (ICC) sequencing process, which aims to identify and support the most promising CCUS projects across different industrial sectors and regions.
The report also provides some policy recommendations to enable the deployment of EfW-CCUS in the UK, such as including EfW with CCUS in the options the Government assesses when it considers investment in the decarbonization of industrial clusters, developing policy that reflects the system value of the negative emissions that EfW with CCUS can provide, and carrying out a more detailed option and techno-economic analysis of the technical and economic aspects of decarbonizing EfW plants.
