$396.55
Carbon credits for climate change mitigation. Delivery year: 2030. Currently available: 3,584.00 metric tons.
Hafslund Celsio is executing the world’s first full-scale carbon capture retrofit of a waste-to-energy (WtE) facility. By installing carbon capture technology at its Klemetsrud plant in Oslo, Norway, Hafslund Celsio turns a necessary waste management process into a source of carbon removal. The facility incinerates residual waste that cannot be recycled—approximately 50% of which is biogenic (organic) material—and captures the resulting CO2 emissions, preventing them from entering the atmosphere and permanently sequestering them.
Hafslund Celsio’s approach leverages the existing infrastructure of district heating and waste management to achieve negative emissions. The process involves several key stages:
Incineration: The facility receives residual waste (trash that cannot be reused or recycled) from the Oslo region. This waste is incinerated to generate electricity and heat for the city’s district heating network.
Differentiation: The waste stream contains a mix of materials. Roughly half is “fossil” based (like plastics), and half is “biogenic” (like food waste, paper, and wood). Capturing the fossil CO2 reduces emissions, while capturing the biogenic CO2 actively removes carbon from the natural cycle, creating “negative emissions”.
Capture: The flue gas from the incinerator passes through a capture unit—specifically the “Just Catch” modularized system provided by SLB Capturi—which uses a solvent to scrub the CO2 from the gas stream before it leaves the smokestack.
Liquefaction and Transport: The captured CO2 is liquefied and temporarily stored at the port of Oslo. It is then loaded onto ships and transported to the Northern Lights facility on the Norwegian west coast.
Permanent Storage: Finally, the CO2 is injected 2,600 meters below the seabed into a saline aquifer in the North Sea for permanent geological storage.
The Klemetsrud facility is Norway’s largest waste-to-energy plant, processing approximately 350,000 tons of waste annually. Once the carbon capture retrofit is operational (expected in 2029), it aims to capture up to 350,000 to 400,000 tons of CO2 per year. Of this total, approximately 175,000 tons will be biogenic carbon removal. The project is part of “Longship,” the Norwegian government’s full-scale CCS value chain initiative, ensuring robust infrastructure for transport and storage.
Hafslund Celsio’s project serves as a blueprint for the roughly 500 other waste-to-energy facilities across Europe. Retrofitting these existing plants represents a massive opportunity to scale carbon removal rapidly without building new standalone infrastructure. By proving the technical and economic viability of this model, Hafslund Celsio aims to unlock a potential removal capacity of over 400 million tons of CO2 per year across the continent by 2050.