The North London Waste Authority has awarded two contracts for consultancy services working towards developing a carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility at its Edmonton site. WSP Environment & Infrastructure Solutions UK Limited has won a £61k contract to provide planning servicers. Amberside Advisors won a £275k contract to provide financial services, including project lifecycle financial modelling, developing a commercial basis for an investment decision and investigating opportunities for grant funding or financing options with external bodies.
North London Waste Authority (NLWA) is a statutory authority managing waste collected by seven north London boroughs – Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Hackney, Haringey, Islington and Waltham Forest. It is building a new waste to energy plant at the Edmonton EcoPark, for which it won development consent on 24 February 2017.
NLWA is now investigating the possibility of developing a CCS facility at the Edmonton EcoPark site and integration with potential future CO2 transport and storage. The company said it was accelerating plans to fit CCS technology and it planned to make the energy from waste plant “ready for adaptation to CCS as soon as the technology is available in north London”.
For the overall CCS project, NLWA will proceed through two stages: scoping the scheme, narrowing the options to a target solution and enabling delivery through appropriate stakeholder partnerships and agreements; and preparing an outline business case.
As well as generating electricity, the energy from waste plant will supply a heat network supplying heat and hot water for up to 60,000 local homes and businesses.
As with biomass, between a third and a quarter of the energy generated in the energy from wast facility will be needed to capture, compress, transport and store CO2 emitted during combustion – jeopardising the facility’s viability. Particularly in the power sector, CCS is characterised globally by failure – even where, unlike beneath London, the geology is, in theory, favourable. As experience in Norway suggests, theory about permanent geological storage and might not match practice. Reflecting global experience, the percentage of CO2 actually captured is likely to be at best half that proposed, especially given the variability of the waste being burned.