'Decarbonisation hubs' plan for carbon capture at Yorkshire waste sites explained - with trial already under way

Energy-from-waste company enfinium currently runs facilities to incinerate unrecyclable rubbish and create energy for hundreds of thousands of homes from the process.

It has a site at Ferrybridge and is in the process of constructing a similar site in Leeds at Skelton Grange.

The company is currently trialling carbon capture technology at its site in Ferrybridge trying to capture one tonne of CO2 per day.

It ultimately wants to deliver up to 1.2 million tonnes of carbon removals a year in the 2030s from its site, with a £1.7bn investment programme planned and an intention to operate five ‘decarbonisation hubs’ across the country.

Karl Smyth, Director of External Affairs and Strategic Policy for enfinium, told the summit that carbon capture is vital to the UK hitting net zero by 2050.

"Carbon capture storage is using a technology that captures the emissions as they come out of our facility, processing it and storing it safely off the North Sea.

"There's a double benefit as we have two different types of carbon going through our facility. We’ve got fossil-originated carbon, things like plastic bottles.

"Separately we have got biogenic carbon – CO2 that was already in the atmosphere then used by us as a society, thrown away and it comes to us. At the moment we turn it into electricity or heat and that CO2 gets released into the atmosphere.

"We’ve not added CO2 to the atmosphere, we’ve just moved it around a carbon cycle but if we use carbon capture technology we can actually take that CO2 capture it, and bury it underground.

"That is a carbon removal and the reason why that’s important is because when we think about the net in net zero the UK’s Climate Change Committee has effectively said there’ll be some sectors of the economy that despite their best efforts are just not going to able to achieve zero emissions by 2050. It is things like agriculture, aviation and others.

"For us to achieve 2050 net zero, we need to have something in parallel which is absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it. We have trees but that is not a scalable strategy in the long-term.

"This is why opportunities like doing CCS at energy from waste facilities are strategically important to us achieving our net zero ambitions.”

The UK Government aims to capture between 20 to 30 million tonnes of CO2 per year by 2030 and over 50 million tonnes per year by 2035.

A spokesperson for enfinium: “Ferrybridge will contribute significantly to the UK’s decarbonisation efforts.”