In the UK, carbon capture technology developer MOF Technologies Ltd (trading as Nuada) has announced that its next-generation carbon capture technology is now operational at enfinium’s Ferrybridge 1 energy-from-waste (EfW) facility in West Yorkshire. The successful commissioning of the pilot plant marks the start of a collaboration between Nuada, and enfinium, a leading UK EfW operator.
The demonstration will run for a minimum of six months. The trial will showcase the performance of Nuada’s carbon capture technology in an industrial EfW setting for the first time.
For enfinium, it represents a key step towards its ambition to deploy carbon capture at scale across its portfolio of six UK facilities, affirming its position as a leader in decarbonising the waste sector.
The new pilot plant uses metal-organic framework (MOF) technology that captures carbon dioxide (CO2) from point sources through a vacuum pressure swing adsorption (VPSA) process.
According to Nuada, this innovation has the potential to deliver significant efficiencies when deployed at a commercial scale.
Partnering with enfinium on this trial allows us to demonstrate the performance of our innovative carbon capture technology. We believe that CCUS innovation like ours can help the EfW sector to efficiently unlock value from an existing waste stream of CO2. We look forward to deepening our partnership and supporting enfinium’s CCUS goals, said Dr Conor Hamill, co-CEO of Nuada.
Energy-from-waste can deliver carbon removals
Around 50 percent of the unrecyclable waste produced by society is made up of biogenic content, including organic material such as food waste, plants, and paper, which has already naturally absorbed CO2 from the atmosphere.
Installing CCS technology at an energy-from-waste facility enables this biogenic carbon dioxide (bioCO2) to be permanently captured and stored rather than released back into the atmosphere, resulting in a net carbon removal from the atmosphere.
Recent analyses by the Climate Change Committee (CCC) and the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies (OIES) found that the energy-from-waste sector could contribute between 5 and 8 million tonnes of carbon removals annually by 2050.
Deploying waste-to-energy carbon capture at scale is critical to decarbonise the UK’s unrecyclable waste and generate the carbon removals needed to achieve net zero. Nuada’s next-generation carbon capture technology has the potential to deliver sizeable energy and cost savings in the carbon capture process. The piloting of this exciting technology at our Ferrybridge facility enables us to better understand how we can deploy carbon capture at scale across our entire fleet, said Simon Forshaw, VP Engineering & Construction at enfinium.
