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Catapult: energy from Waste Plants UK with Carbon Capture

Catapult Energy Systems released as part of their ‘Reports and Insight Papers’ an article on Energy from Waste Plants UK with Carbon Capture. Energy from Waste plants in the UK currently emits around 11 Mte CO2 per year, with proposed and under-construction energy facilities potentially adding another 9 Mte CO2 per year. Reducing these emissions would have a material impact on the UK’s low carbon energy transition. Preliminary analysis of the potential of fitting Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) equipment to the growing number of Energy from Waste (EfW) plants in the UK as a means of CO2 reduction has therefore been undertaken. The key conclusion from this analysis is that the cost of EfW-CCUS technology as a means of emissions abatement is competitive with other industrial abatement options.

Key Messages

  • Many EfW plants are geographically well located for CCUS, being in industrial clusters near to accessible CO2 storage locations
  • A significant proportion of the UK’s EfW fleet is relatively new compared to other industrial facilities, and they, therefore, have a long life ahead of them in which to benefit from a CCUS retrofit investment
  • CCUS significantly improves the sustainability of Energy from Waste facilities and can, therefore, mitigate many of the system-level environmental issues that threaten the long-term sustainability of EfW in the UK
  • On a lowest system transition cost basis, fitting CCUS to EfW plants could lead to 20% of all captured CO2 in the UK being derived from EfW plants by 2050, with a corresponding 20% overall increase in CO2 being captured in the same timeframe compared with the case without EfW-CCUS being available.

For the full article, click here.

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