First Carbon Capture Starts at Norwegian Waste-To-Energy Plant

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Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland)--The first carbon capture project at a waste-to-energy (WTE) power plant has started at the Klemetsrud facility in Oslo, Norway.

Aker Solutions ASA (OSE:AKSO) (Fornebu, Norway) said the pilot program will capture emissions at the municipality-operated Klemetsrud, Norway's largest WTE plant, over a five-month period. Capable of incinerating 310,000 tonnes of waste annually, the plant supplies 175- gigawatt hours (GWh) of power and 750- GWh of district heating to the city of Oslo. The plant emits about 300,000 tons of CO2 per year, Aker said. The project is being funded by Gassnova SF (Porsgrunn, Norway), the Norwegian state enterprise that oversees carbon capture and storage (CCS).

"This is pioneering work with significant potential as the world focuses on finding ways to limit carbon emissions," said Valborg Lundegaard, head of Aker Solutions' engineering business. "As such, this pilot project is of international importance."

The test uses the company's mobile test unit for carbon capture. Aker said that gas released from Klemetsrud contains about 10% CO2 and is treated in several steps before it enters the mobile unit. The unit uses Aker's amine-based CO2 capture technology.

"We expect to capture up to 90% of the CO2," explained Oscar Graff, head of CCS at Aker. "The tests will verify important operating parameters such as energy consumption, solvent degradation, losses and required solvent make-up."

The company believes there is a large opportunity for carbon capture in the WTE sector, with more than 450 plants in Europe and about 700 globally.

The mobile test unit has been in continuous operation at industrial sites since 2008 and is described as a "complete carbon capture facility in small scale which can be efficiently installed at sites to test the performance of capturing CO2 from various flue gases."

Norway leads the world in CCS. The world's most advanced CCS project, located at the Mongstad oil refinery, officially opened in 2012, two years late and at a cost of about $1 billion. For additional information, see May 10, 2012, article - Norway Opens Leading Carbon Capture Facility.

Since then, however, the Norwegian government has pulled the plug on finishing the project, claiming that the investment was too risky. Instead, it will focus investment on a wider range of CCS research projects and hopes to have at least one full-scale commercial CCS project up and running by 2020. For additional information, see September 27, 2013, article - Norway Drops Leading Carbon Capture Project.

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