OPINION: The Independent Review of Green House Gas Removals (GGR) published this week highlights the significant opportunities that exist for the UK’s waste sector to harness this important tool, which the report concludes will be vital to reach national net-zero targets.
The review, which was published on Thursday 23 October, explores myriad solutions for GGR as well as the UK policy landscape, and makes a number of recommendations to Government about how to develop a strategy to support and deploy greenhouse gas removals – advocating adoption of a “portfolio approach” of technologies and solutions which will include Waste to Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (WECCS) (a term the review recommends is standardised to aid clarity and consistency of terminology).
The ESA very much welcomes the findings and recommendations of the review, and we were pleased to have a chance to contribute to it alongside other stakeholders. We look forward to working with Government to realise the potential of WECCS and the valuable contribution it will make towards meeting our sectoral and national net-zero targets.
For the uninitiated, WECCS are able to create carbon removals because roughly half of the residual waste feedstock processed by Energy from Waste (EfW) plants is biogenic in nature, which means that the biogenic emissions are captured alongside fossil-based emissions, resulting in a removal, where Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is also deployed. EfW facilities are long-term assets which operate on a consistent basis, so the sector is well placed to act as an anchor technology for developing CCS and the nascent GGR market. In fact, industry estimates place the potential contribution of EfW derived GGRs at 41% of the total UK Government GGR target in 2030.
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) also acknowledged the role EfW could play in the GGR sector within the most recent 7th Carbon Budget. Their waste pathway found that WECCS delivered around 5 MtCO2e of removals each year by 2050. These removals balanced out the residual emissions remaining in the waste sector, which is why this solution represents an important component for delivering our sectoral net-zero ambitions.
ESA members own and operate the majority of the UK’s EfW plants and our industry has actively pursued the deployment of CCS technology since the publication of our Net Zero strategy in 2021 – with the review citing case studies from EfW operators Encyclis and Enfinium, which have both been trialling carbon capture and storage (CCS).
Moving towards implementation at full commercial scale, two WECCS projects – Runcorn (Viridor) and Protos (Encyclis) – were selected by the UK Government to move forward in negotiations for Track-1 CCS funding via the Waste Industrial Carbon Capture (ICC) Business Model, and the Protos facility in Ellesmere Port has now begun full-scale construction after signing a contract with Government earlier this quarter.
Beyond these initial projects, other ESA members have ambitions to install CCS at their facilities in the future. For example, the London-based Cory Riverside CCS project looks to capture 90% of the emissions from its existing EfW facility and the new adjacent facility, capturing 1.4 MtCO2e each year, which is roughly equivalent to 700,000 tonnes of GGRs each year.
Enfinium has committed to investing around £1.7 billion in CCS across its six facilities, and has successfully run pilot CCS projects at its Ferrybridge and Parc Adfer sites.
One of the big challenges for the EfW sector to overcome is not the capture of emissions, but the transport and permanent storage of liquid carbon.
The review cites the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies which, in 2024, found that 60 to 65% of the UK’s EfW sites could undergo CCS retrofit, while the remainder may be precluded due to space constraints at EfW sites or insufficient CO2 transport options.
Across the existing and emerging fleet, six large EfW facilities are co-located near the announced Government Track-1 CCS clusters in Merseyside and Teesside, and they are subsequently best placed to generate GGRs through the use of CCS pipelines. These facilities have the potential to generate 2.04 MtCO2 of GGRs a year.
A further 22 facilities are located less than 50km from CO2 storage clusters or large ports, which creates a second phase of potential EfW facilities able to invest in CCS technologies through non-pipeline means. These facilities have the potential to generate 4.27 MtCO2 of GGRs a year.
The remaining fleet of 48 facilities are more dispersed in nature owing to the need to co-locate facilities where waste is generated. For these facilities, their pathway to installing CCS technologies and delivering GGRs at commercial scale is less certain and dependent upon the development of dispersed non-pipeline infrastructure or carbon capture utilisation routes.
However, these are challenges ESA members are actively working to overcome and the implementation of a GGR Strategy by Government and an Office for Greenhouse Gas Removals, as recommended by the review, will help to coordinate action on GGRs and enable quicker rollout of both policy and projects.
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