Carbon Capture from Energy-from-Waste (EfW): A Low-Hanging Fruit for CCS Deployment in the UK?
The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies has published a new report evaluating the business case for carbon capture and storage in the UK’s energy-from-waste sector.
The report highlights how the integration of carbon capture and storage (CCS) can help maintain energy from waste facilities as a source of sustainable, low-carbon energy while also meaningfully contributing to the UK’s emission reduction targets. enfinium, who contributed to the report, have already announced their intentions to utilise CCS to decarbonise their operations and deliver carbon removals
Energy-from-waste (EfW) is a waste treatment process that combusts residual waste after re-use, recycling and composting to produce energy in the form of electricity and/or heat.
In the UK, the EfW sector contributes around 3% of total national power output, but also 3.5% of overall territorial GHG emissions, making its decarbonisation critical.
As waste is composed of fossil and biogenic content, retrofitting EfW with CCS has the potential to reduce emissions (by capturing fossil CO2) but also generate valuable negative emissions (by capturing biogenic CO2) which can contribute to the UK’s negative emissions targets.
The study assesses the technical feasibility of installing carbon capture technology at the facility level, taking the entire UK fleet into account.
It also identifies different methods to transport CO2 from EfW facilities to the nearest storage sites, using transport cost and emissions intensity of different transport modes (pipeline, rail, truck, ship) as metrics to evaluate what is economically feasible, and emissions-wise acceptable.
