The Next Big Thing in Carbon Capture? Trash.

A group of technology companies is investing in a new form of carbon capture that aims to cut emissions from household waste in an effort to reduce landfill use and to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. 

Frontier, an umbrella group of tech companies including payments firm Stripe, internet giant Google and software company Salesforce, is investing just under $32 million in a carbon-capture-and-storage project in Norway in the hope of removing 100,000 metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere between 2029 and 2030. 

Under the plan, carbon-dioxide emissions that are generated when trash from the Norwegian capital Oslo is burned to produce energy for heating will be captured and then stored under the North Sea. The initiative is part of a larger carbon-capture project known as the Northern Lights project.  

The project is being put together in conjunction with the Norwegian government and Hafslund Celsio—Norway’s largest supplier of district heating—which runs the waste-to-energy site. 

How It Works

At the site in Norway, household waste is sorted into fossil waste and biogenic waste. Fossil waste includes materials like plastics, which can’t be broken down quickly. Biogenic waste includes trash that has come from organic sources, such as food scraps or garden waste.

After sorting, the waste is then burned by Hafslund Celsio, with the energy created used to heat the city of Oslo. The company is retrofitting the plant with a carbon capture system to collect an estimated 90% of the emissions from burning. Those emissions are then compressed and shipped to be stored under the ocean floor, in massive caverns left from oil and gas exploration. 

By burning and storing the emissions from the biogenic waste, Hafslund Celsio creates high-value carbon removal credits, which it plans to sell to Frontier.

Plants naturally draw down carbon dioxide, or CO₂, from the atmosphere. When they are burned, the CO₂ is released. But at the Norwegian incinerator, the carbon is immediately captured, and CO₂ is thus taken out of the atmospheric cycle. When biogenic waste is sent to landfill, methane is emitted once it breaks down. Methane is much more potent in terms of its effect on global warming than CO₂.

Claw lifting up residual waste before it gets incinerated to generate heat and electricity. Photo: Go electra / Hafslund Celsio

Meanwhile, avoidance carbon credits are created by capturing the CO₂ from burning the plastics and other products made from fossil fuels. This is because the emissions that would have been emitted from burning the plastics are largely avoided. That said, these credits are much lower in value because no carbon dioxide is actually removed through the process.

The two main options of dealing with waste either involve landfiling or incineration, according to Hasan Muslemani, head of carbon management research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. The issue with landfilling, he said, is that this eventually creates methane which is about 30 times worse for the atmosphere from a global warming potential.

With incineration, CO₂ directly enters the atmosphere—this is where CCS comes in. It brings the best of both worlds: no CO₂ entering the air today or methane in the future. You are also producing low-carbon energy (electricity and heat) which can potentially be sold at a premium, Muslemani said.

Just the Beginning

This process could be replicated across 500 other sites in Europe alone, with places such as Germany and the U.K. particularly suited for waste-to-energy carbon capture, according to Frontier. By doing so, some 400 million tons of carbon dioxide could be removed from the atmosphere by 2050. 

The Frontier group of buyers was set up to scale carbon removal. Experts say that more than 10 billion tons of carbon will need to be removed from the atmosphere to help limit the effects of climate change. However, the carbon-removal market is very much in its early days and most technologies are limited in deployment, cashflow and maturity. Frontier says that by buying forward commitments for removal projects, it helps to provide finance and get the market off the ground.

Norway is an ideal place to run a waste-to-energy carbon capture project, according to Hasan Muslemani, head of carbon management research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. Photo: ints kalnins/Reuters

There are new technologies that exist in the lab or exist at small scales, and they’re really expensive today, and there’s a lot of technology risk, said Hannah Bebbington, head of deployment for Frontier. The group says that by purchasing credits in advance it sends a signal to the market that there will be demand for carbon removals in the future. We will be the customer of the product if you build it to the spec that we’re interested in, Bebbington said.

Norway is an ideal place to run a project like this, Muslemani said. The country has long had a carbon tax in place, incentivizing projects such as this one, and with the funding from the Norwegian and local governments, this helps to provide cash to get projects up and running. He added that similar projects in the U.K. could copy this, with the country eyeing carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes to provide incentives for this. 

In terms of revenue from the carbon credits, the removal credits could be sold for as much as $200 a ton while the avoidance credits for $20 a ton, which along with the green-energy production makes projects like this financially viable, Muslemani said.