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.
CCS has emerged as a promising decarbonisation solution. 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.
This study evaluates the business case for CCS in the UK EfW sector 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.
The report highlights how the integration of 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 use CCS to decarbonise their operations and deliver carbon removals.
The report found that the potential to generate negative emissions from the UK EfW sector is substantial. "Under the most conservative scenario in the study, which assumes a low emissions intensity factor of 0.7 tCO2 emitted per tonne of waste combusted, and only considering facilities where there is high certainty of available on-site space for CCS retrofit, we estimate that around 5 Mtpa of negative emissions can be captured from the entire UK fleet," it said.
"If a higher emissions intensity factor of 1.18 tCO2/t is assumed, this estimate increases up to 8 Mtpa; that is while excluding facilities where further analysis on space availability is needed, which may increase this estimate even further."
The report concludes that the Efw sector is indeed a low hanging fruit for negative emissions. "In the UK context specifically, at a time when the UK Government has committed to adopting CCS as a main pathway for national decarbonisation – evident by its now-established CCS business models including the Waste ICC contracts framework – this study makes clear that the EfW sector may well be the low-hanging fruit for CCS deployment and the well-needed generation of negative emissions nationally."