Abby L. Harvey
GHG Daily
1/26/2016
Oslo, Norway’s Waste-to-Energy Agency on Monday launched a first-of-its-kind test plant at its waste incineration plant at Klemetsrud. The waste-to-energy plant is Oslo’s greatest source of emissions, responsible for about 20 percent of the city’s total emissions. Oslo-based Aker Solutions will test its CO2 capture technology at the plant. "This is pioneering work with significant potential as the world focuses on finding ways to limit carbon emissions," Valborg Lundegaard, head of Aker Solutions’ engineering business, said in a press release. "As such, this pilot project is of international importance."
The five-month test will employ Aker’s mobile test unit to investigate the effectiveness of the company’s amine-based CO2 capture technology for use on waste-to-energy plants. According to an Aker release, the gas released at the Klemetsrud plant is roughly 10 percent CO2. "We expect to capture up to 90 percent of the CO2," said Oscar Graff, head of CCS at Aker Solutions, in the release. "The tests will verify important operating parameters such as energy consumption, solvent degradation, losses and required solvent make-up." The plant emits a total of about 300,000 tons of CO2 annually.
Gassnova, the Norwegian state enterprise that supports the development and demonstration of technologies to capture carbon dioxide, is funding the project. Details of the cost of the project have not been released. Gassnova named the waste-to-energy plant among a list of potential future hosts for CCS projects in a May 2015 pre-feasibility study, stating that “Klemetsrud may be a relevant facility for CO2 capture, which could potentially be combined with other capture projects.”
Following the Gassnova study, planning for the project progressed swiftly. A final decision to move forward was made in June 2015, and Aker signed on to the project in December 2015.
The project’s expediency drew praise from Norway-based environmental group Bellona. “We are actually surprised by how fast this process has moved,” Bellona President Frederic Hauge said in a release. “This shows that this is completely feasible when there is a will to do it.”
If the test results show promise, the technology could be adopted for other such plants worldwide. The Aker release says 700 such plants currently operate globally, including 450 in Europe. "We see potential in this market across the world," Lundegaard said.
