Frontier Signs Deal to Remove 100,000 Tonnes of Carbon Emissions from Garbage Incineration

Frontier, a carbon removal buyer coalition, announced that it has facilitated purchases of 100,000 tons of carbon removals to be generated between 2029 and 2030, through the abatement of emissions from a waste incineration plant owned by power and heat provider Hafslund Celsio.

The agreement will support the first-ever retrofit of a waste-to-energy facility to deliver carbon removal, according to Frontier.

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Launched in April 2022, Frontier is an advance market commitment to buy permanent carbon removal, aimed at accelerating the development of carbon removal technologies with guarantees of future demand. In addition to setting a demand pool for carbon removal, Frontier also vets suppliers, with a focus on solutions with the potential to achieve high volume and low cost.

Companies participating in the $31.6 million offtake agreement include Stripe, Google, Shopify, McKinsey Sustainability, Autodesk, H&M Group, JPMorganChase, Workday, and Salesforce. Additionally, through Frontier’s partnership with Watershed, companies including Aledade, Match Group, Samsara, SKIMS, Skyscanner, Wise, and Zendesk will also participate.

Hannah Bebbington, Head of Deployment at Frontier, said:“Waste-to-energy retrofitted with carbon capture is a no-brainer solution for managing pre-sorted, residual waste: it generates carbon-free energy and removes CO₂ from the atmosphere.”

Hafslund Celsio operates a waste-to-energy facility in Oslo which incinerates around 350,000 metric tons of sorted residual waste each year, with excess energy used to produce electricity and heat. According to the company, the process results in both biogenic CO₂ emissions from burning organic material like spoiled paper and cardboard, as well as fossil CO₂ emissions from burning inorganic materials such as plastics.

The new agreement will support the company’s retrofit, adding a unit to the facility that will capture the CO₂ emissions. While the agreement only covers the facility’s abated biogenic emissions, Hafslund Celsio estimates that the project could capture 175,000 tons of biogenic emissions as well as 175,000 tons of fossil CO₂ per year. Once captured, the CO₂ will be transported by ship to the Northern Lights facility for permanent geological storage.

According to Frontier, the waste-to-energy retrofit could serve as a “roadmap” to other facilities in Europe, with annual carbon removal potential of 100 million tons of CO₂ currently, and as much as 400 million tons by 2050.

Jannicke Gerner Bjerkås, Director CCS and Carbon Markets at Hafslund Celsio, said:“We’re proud to be the first to take a step toward retrofitting waste-to-energy with carbon removal. Frontier buyers are not only enabling this project to get off the ground, but also validating a model that could be replicated throughout Europe, with the potential to remove tens of millions of tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere.”