Hafslund Celsio, the largest supplier of district heating in Norway and owner and operator of the country’s largest waste incinerator plant located in the Oslo area, has signed offtake agreements facilitated by Frontier.
As part of the agreements, Hafslund Celsio will remove 100,000 tons of CO2 in the period between 2029 and 2030, supported by a $31.6 million investment made by Frontier buyers.
The carbon dioxide removal (CDR) will be delivered through Hafslund Celsio’s Oslo-based waste-to-energy plant, the first facility of its kind to be retrofitted with a carbon removal unit.
This location annually processes around 350,000 metric tons of sorted residual waste that has already been stripped of its recyclable parts and can’t be put to further use, posing the risk of methane emissions if left untreated.
By incinerating these organic and inorganic waste materials, the plant generates excess energy that is used for the production of heat and electricity.
Once retrofitted with a carbon removal system, the Oslo waste-to-energy facility will capture both biogenic CO2 emissions (from burning organic waste) and fossil CO2 emissions (from burning inorganic materials) during the incineration process.
The captured CO2 will then be loaded on a ship to be transported to the Northern Lights carbon storage facility for permanent geological storage.
According to Hafslund Celsio, the plant is able to reach an annual carbon removal capacity of up to 175,000 tons of biogenic CO2 and 175,000 tons of fossil CO2.
Relevant: New Isometric Paper Sees Waste-To-Energy As A Carbon Removal Method
While the current CDR potential of waste-to-energy retrofits stands at around 100 million tons of CO2, in the future, this capacity could be scaled to exceed 400 million tons by 2050.
As the retrofitting is performed on existing infrastructures, lowering CDR deployment costs, this technology paves a promising carbon removal path for waste-to-energy plants.
Europe alone is home to approximately 500 operating waste-to-energy facilities, which, if retrofitted, could contribute to the removal of hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide.
Read more: Rebel Fuels Launches To Transform Waste CO2 Into Carbon-Neutral Fuels
