The new Labour Government has hit the ground running on clean power. Their ambition to decarbonise the grid by 2030 is a laudable but challenging undertaking. They are making early progress, such as through planning reforms, lifting the onshore wind ‘ban', and the forthcoming boost to offshore wind through GB Energy. These are all welcome and necessary measures given the scale of the challenge the UK faces to fully decarbonise its energy supply.
There are, however, no silver bullets. A holistic approach will be necessary if the Government is to achieve this guiding mission. Renewable, intermittent power must be complemented by baseload and dispatchable supply if we are to keep the lights on. This is where Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) can play an integral part.
CCS will play a crucial role in achieving several of the Government's objectives, whether it is the near-term 2030 target to decarbonise the grid, the wider goal of achieving Net Zero by 2050, or the ambition to spread investment across the regions of the UK. However, limited resources and capacity must be used wisely and, as we have set out before, not all CCS is created equal.
The energy from waste sector is the original climate technology in the waste sector. Since the late 1990s and the introduction of the Landfill Tax, energy from waste has driven a huge reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from the sector, diverting millions of tonnes of unrecyclable waste from landfill and preventing the associated methane emissions. The advent of CCS presents us with a unique opportunity to not only finally decarbonise the unrecyclable waste we as a society produce – and will continue to produce into the future – but it offers us the opportunity to put the ‘net' into net zero.
This is because applying CCS to energy from waste has a little-appreciated benefit: the ability to generate carbon removals, also known as negative emissions.
Around half of the UK's unrecyclable waste is biogenic, the likes of food waste, kitchen roll, tissues, or contaminated pizza boxes. As the plants or trees grow that ultimately make up this waste, they naturally absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. When combusted at a facility with CCS, this embedded CO2 is permanently captured and stored underground, not released back into the air, resulting in a net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere.
With CCS, the energy from waste sector will provide home-grown, dispatchable carbon-negative power, alongside carbon-negative heat to local networks, all the while generating million tonnes of net carbon removals from the atmosphere. CCS is a real opportunity, not simply an excuse for our sector to continue to exist. After all, without energy from waste the waste we process doesn't disappear, it simply ends up buried in landfill for future generations to manage while generating far more climate-damaging emissions.
At enfinium, we are leading the way on getting CCS off the ground in our sector, so we can begin removing carbon from the atmosphere and providing carbon-negative electricity to the grid. In May this year, we released our Net Zero Transition Plan which sets out our plan to invest £1.7 billion into CCS across our fleet.
Our existing facility in North Wales, Parc Adfer, will spearhead our transformation. This project represents a £200m investment opportunity on Deeside, which would transform the site into Wales's largest carbon removals project. It would put Wales at the forefront of CCS globally, decarbonise the unrecyclable waste produced across the region, and generate economic growth, including through the creation of 1,000 jobs during the construction phase.
This project could be online and producing carbon-negative power for the grid by 2030 – this is however contingent on the success of our bid to the UK Government for the project to become a ‘Track-1' project as part of the HyNet cluster, which would allow us to access that transport and storage network.
The Government has real decisions to make about how to best use its finite resources and time to achieve its objectives. When considering where to allocate CCS resource, pound for pound, energy from waste offers the greatest climate-returns. It will allow us to take material already passing through our facilities, today considered a problem to be managed, and transform this into a key part of the solution, be that generating carbon-negative power, facilitating a circular economy, or achieving Net Zero by 2050.
For 2030, for 2050, and beyond, we stand ready to play our part.
