Central Bedfordshire Council gave consent today (22 December 2025) for the plant to be built on land adjoining the waste management company’s Rookery South Energy Recovery Facility (ERF).
The site is currently home to one of the UK’s first waste sector carbon capture pilot plants.
Mark Burrows-Smith, Chief Executive at Encyclis, said: “The confirmation of planning permission for Rookery South is another milestone achievement in our industry-leading mission to enable the decarbonisation of residual waste treatment.
“Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a key component of that strategy and we have already started construction on our landmark Protos CCS project in the North West.
“With planning permission now secured for Rookery South ERF, Encyclis has sufficient planning consents to allow capture of CO2 volumes equivalent to our fossil CO2 emissions across our Midlands cluster.”
The installation of the technology would allow Encyclis to capture carbon dioxide from the EfW process to be transported for storage.
Flue gases from the combustion process would be diverted to the carbon capture plant, where CO2 molecules are stripped out and transferred away from the site for storage.
Carbon capture at the Protos ERF
Encyclis reached financial close with the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) to build the first full-scale carbon capture plant for EfW at its Protos ERF in Cheshire.
The plant is expected to be operational in May 2029.
Rookery will be the second facility to install carbon capture out of Encyclis’ core Midlands cluster.
This week, the Bedfordshire ERF is due to hit the milestone of two million tonnes of residual waste processed since it opened in January 2022.
Rookery South ERF has an annual capacity of 657,000 tonnes of residual waste and generates 60MWH of baseload electricity which is supplied to the National Grid.
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