Carbon emissions captured at site burning waste for energy

Britain’s biggest site generating energy from waste has become the first to capture some of its carbon emissions as it works towards becoming “carbon-negative” by the start of the next decade.

Enfinium, which generates electricity by burning unrecyclable refuse at two plants at Ferrybridge, West Yorkshire, is using carbon capture and storage technology, capturing a tonne of carbon dioxide a day.

The technology is a containerised, scaled-down version of the carbon capture and storage technology that enfinium hopes to introduce to all six of its sites under a £1.7 billion investment programme intended to remove 1.2 million tonnes of carbon a year by the 2030s.

The pilot scheme will run for at least 12 months and is collecting operational data, such as the carbon capture rate. It will assess the performance of different “amine solvents”, which are used to separate the CO₂ from the gas that otherwise would have been released into the atmosphere.

The company hopes to bid for funding that had been pledged by the previous government to support the deployment of carbon capture and storage technology in Britain to help to meet climate change goals. Two “clusters” have been picked for the first wave of the development — HyNet in northwest England and the East Coast Cluster in the northeast — with both the initial storage sites and emitters having been selected. A process to expand the number of emitters feeding into the HyNet project was started at the end of last year, but one has yet to be launched for the East Coast cluster.

Enfinium hopes to feed CO₂ into the East Coast Cluster, which would store the emissions in the Endurance saline aquifer in the North Sea.

Mike Maudsley, 56, its chief executive, said that even if government recycling targets were hit, the UK still would have about 17 million tonnes of non-recyclable waste in the early 2040s that would need to be “decarbonised. By investing in carbon capture technology, enfinium can decarbonise this waste, accelerate economic growth across the UK by creating decarbonisation hubs and take CO₂ out of the atmosphere to help the UK achieve net zero.”

Enfinium is owned by Igneo Infrastructure Partners, part of Australia’s First Sentier Investors, and is backed by Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, of Japan.