High Level Analysis of CO2 Capture in the Waste-To-Energy Sector

Abstract

There is currently a large amount of interest from the Waste-to-Energy (WtE) sector in Europe towards implementation of post-combustion carbon capture technology. This study gives a high level analysis of the implementation of a CO2 capture plant (no post-treatment of the captured CO2 is considered) for three generic WtE plants that process 60, 200 and 500 kton of waste per year respectively. The heat and electricity demand of the plants are analysed and compared to the energy generation of the reference WtE plant. It is shown that regardless of the size of the plant, approximately 53% of the steam for district heating and 5% of the electricity generation of the reference WtE plant is needed to run the CO2 capture plant. Additionally, a techno-economic analysis has been conducted that shows that the expected costs for a CO2 capture plant are 30 to 55 €/ton CO2 captured, depending on the considered scale. Additionally, it is shown that for smaller WtE plants, CAPEX is the dominant factor, while for larger WtE plants, the variable OPEX is dominating.