INTERVIEW: Fortum Oslo Varme hails CCS for waste plant as model for hard-to-abate sectors

A waste-to-power plant in Norway plans to add a carbon capture and storage system in a move it says could provide a model for sectors with hard-to-abate CO2 emissions, the director of CCS for the Fortum Oslo Varme project told S&P Global Platts Nov. 15.

The waste incineration plant in Oslo is seeking to capture 400,000 mt/year of CO2, 90% of the plant's emissions, Jannicke Bjerkas said in an interview.

"Waste-to-energy, combined with CCS, will not only provide a more sustainable solution than landfills, but it will also make it possible to reduce and remove CO2 from this process and go carbon negative," Bjerkas said.

"One of the unique things about waste-to-energy, which makes it a very good fit with CCS, is that about 50% of the waste that is incinerated is biogenic, which means that when we capture and store that CO2, we are actually removing CO2 from the atmosphere," she added.

The project will feed into the Northern Lights carbon storage facility, the storage component of a broader collaboration dubbed Longship by the Norwegian authorities. Longship aims to capture CO2 from industrial processes such as cement manufacturing and transport it by ship to a site in western Norway, from where it will be sent by pipeline for injection into a North Sea reservoir.

A joint venture between state-controlled Equinor, Shell and Total, the project aims to start storing CO2 from industries in northern Europe in 2024.

FOV plans to start CCS operations by the end of 2025, following the start-up of the CO2 transport and storage operations.

FOV is a joint venture between Finnish energy company Fortum and the city of Oslo, which plans to fit the existing Klemetsrud waste-to-energy plant on the outskirts of Oslo with carbon capture technology.

The plant has been operating since the 1980s and burns around 375,000 mt of residual waste a year. The heat from the plant supplies around 20% of Oslo's district heating needs. The project would cut 15% of Oslo's CO2 emissions.

"This will be an important climate measure for large cities all over the world, moving waste away from landfills, which we have to do to reduce methane emissions," Bjerkas said.

Cities produce over 60% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN.

The plant has a heating output of 800 GWh, with 150 GWh of power output which will be used to power the carbon capture process. The heating output will not be affected, Bjerkas said.

"The CO2 capture process doesn't affect the process at the plant very much economically because the energy that we are giving to the capture process, we are regaining into the district heating system via a heat pump," she said.

Carbon removal markets

Building on Longship, Bjerkas said a market for CCS services was emerging in the Nordics.

"With Northern Lights already being realized, the CO2 emitters now have an alternative," she said. "They have an option on how to reduce their emissions to decarbonize their processes."

On carbon markets, Bjerkas noted that a level playing field was needed to make CCS commercially successful on waste incineration plants.

"Both for the waste-to-energy industry and for other industries with emissions otherwise difficult to abate, I think we need to see that there is a cost connected to emitting CO2," she said.

"We will need to see the CO2 price increase, even from today's level," she added. "This technology has a cost, but it's a very effective climate measure, and all climate measures have a cost. It is not very expensive if you compare it to the efficiency and the amount of CO2 that it is actually reducing or even removing."

FOV plans to finance the operation of the plant in the future with carbon removal credits, a legislative proposal that the EU is to work on in 2022.

Platts assessed current year technological carbon capture credits at Eur103.06/mt ($118.00/mt) CO2e Nov. 15. This compares with EU ETS Allowance futures contracts for December 2021 delivery on the ICE Endex exchange closing at Eur65.93/mt Nov. 15.

Waste-to-energy is not included in the EU emissions trading system at present. If taxes were to be levied on CO2 emissions from such plants, similar charges should be applied to other waste solutions such as landfill, otherwise there was a risk of shifting the waste problem elsewhere, Bjerkas said.

Test project

Fortum Oslo Varme built a pilot project at the waste-to-energy plant which ran in 2019 with 5,500 hours of test operations.

"We have really good results," Bjerkas said. "Very low emissions and low degradation, very high capture rates and also stable operations. That makes us confident in the full-scale plant."

The CCS process uses an amine solution to clean the flue gas from the waste incineration in the carbon capture plant. The amine solution attracts the CO2 in the flue gas, and then the CO2-rich amine solution is heated in a stripper unit to release the CO2 molecules before being recycled through the process.

Wider applications

FOV sees the technology as having application across Europe and beyond, with the potential to decarbonize the 500 waste-to-power plants in the continent.

The Oslo CCS project will also capture CO2 emissions from a nearby cement factory, and could be used in new technologies, such as bioenergy with CCS (BECCS), which has the potential for negative emissions, Bjerkas said.

The technology has garnered interest from Drax, which hopes to build a BECCS plant in the UK, and UK Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng has visited the Fortum Oslo plant.

The company failed to secure backing under the first round of the EU's Innovation Fund Nov. 16. FOV had planned to start construction in early 2022, subject to securing funding for the project, part of which it has already received from the Norwegian state and the project partners. It is now considering alternative financing options.

"The decision clearly shows that the EU believes in CCS as a key climate technology," Bjerkas said in a statement Nov. 16. "It is therefore surprising that the European Commission chose not to support our project. We have one of the best-prepared projects for carbon capture in Europe, and a further postponement is challenging."

"This will not put an end to carbon capture for waste incineration in Oslo," she added, saying the company would review feedback from the Innovation Fund and consider whether to apply again under the EU's second funding call.

The funding application was to cover capital and operating costs for the first 10 years.