A carbon capture pilot project is now operational at Enfinium’s Ferrybridge-1 energy from waste (EfW) facility in West Yorkshire, UK.

The commissioning of the pilot plant marks the start of a collaboration between carbon capture tech firm Nuada and the UK energy from waste operator. The demonstration will run for at least six months.

The trial will analyse the performance of Nuada’s carbon capture technology in an industrial EfW setting for the first time. For Enfinium, it represents a step towards its ambition to deploy carbon capture at scale across its portfolio of six UK facilities.

The new pilot plant uses metal-organic framework technology that captures carbon dioxide from point sources through a vacuum swing process. This innovation has the potential to deliver significant efficiencies when deployed at a commercial scale.

Around 50% of the unrecyclable waste produced by society is made up of biogenic content, including organic material such as waste food, plants and paper, which has already naturally absorbed CO₂ from the atmosphere.

Installing carbon capture and storage [CCS] technology at an energy-from-waste facility enables this CO₂ 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 and by the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies has found that energy from waste could as a sector contribute between 5 and 8 million tonnes of carbon removals every year by 2050.

Simon Forshaw, Vice-President of Engineering & Construction at Enfinium, said deploying waste to energy carbon capture at scale was critical to decarbonise the UK’s unrecyclable waste and to generate the carbon removals needed for Net Zero, and the pilot project has the potential to deliver “significant energy and cost savings”.

Dr Conor Hamill, co-CEO of Nuada, said the technology can help the EfW sector to unlock value from an existing waste stream including CO₂. “We look forward to deepening our partnership and supporting enfinium’s CCUS goals,” he said.

Enfinium began the first CCS pilot scheme in Wales in March. It will be the first deployed in the wider HyNet industrial energy cluster.