Enfinium to invest £200m to add carbon capture to energy-from-waste plant

Planning and consenting for the Parc Adfer CCS project will commence later this year.

The multimillion-pound project at the Parc Adfer energy waste facility in North Wales is anticipated to capture up to 235,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually.

More than half of the waste processed at the facility is organic and installing CCS would enable the plant to take more CO2 out of the atmosphere than it produces, according to the waste operator.

Opened in 2019 in partnership with the five local authorities that make up the North Wales Residual Waste Treatment Partnership (NWRWTP), Parc Adfer currently diverts up to 232,000 tonnes of waste from landfill.

According to the National Infrastructure Commission, emissions from energy from waste plants are lower per tonne of waste compared to landfill.

With CCS installed, Parc Adfer will support the Welsh Government’s target to decarbonise its power grid by 2035 and create more than 1,000 jobs in the green economy during the construction phase.

Enfinium’s chief executive officer Mike Maudsley said: “To deliver a net-zero carbon economy, Wales needs to find a way to produce carbon removals, or negative emissions, at scale.

“Installing carbon capture at the Parc Adfer facility would transform it into the largest generator of carbon negative power in Wales, decarbonise unrecyclable waste and support the green economy in Deeside and wider North Wales region.”

The proposal has been put forward for grant support from the UK Government as part of the expansion of its ‘Track-1’ carbon capture programme. The captured carbon will be transported using the pipeline network currently being developed in the region for the HyNet carbon capture cluster, one of the first two priority carbon capture clusters selected for development in the UK.

Planning and consenting for the Parc Adfer CCS project will commence later this year. The UK Government is expected to provide an update on which projects are progressing through the Track-1 HyNet Expansion programme by the summer.

Net Zero Industry Wales’ chief executive officer Ben Burggraaf said: “North-East Wales has an exciting opportunity to leverage technologies like carbon capture and hydrogen to produce the sustainable goods and services of the future.

“It is critical that projects like those at Parc Adfer move forward as quickly as possible to maintain our competitive advantage over other countries.”

The news from Enfinium comes shortly after the UK Government imposed a temporary ban on permits for new energy-from-waste facilities over concerns about their environmental and public health impacts. Junior Environment Minister Sir Mark Spencer instructed the Environment Agency to make this change last week. He stated that the pause will give Ministers time to “lead a piece of work considering the role of waste incineration in the management of residual waste in England”.

The assessment will look at whether the industry is planning to over-provide capacity, thereby undermining government objectives to reduce waste production rates and waste incineration rates. It will also encompass the latest in life-cycle analyses of the environmental impact of energy-from-waste plants.