Norway’s Largest Waste Incineration Plant to Receive $31.6M Investment for Carbon Capture Retrofit

In a bold move towards climate action, a coalition of industry giants—including Stripe, Alphabet, and several others—has committed $31.6 million to retrofit Norway’s largest waste incineration facility with carbon capture technology. Frontier, a pioneering consortium focused on backing early-stage carbon removal solutions, is spearheading this initiative. Frontier has already pledged $1 billion to fund innovative carbon mitigation approaches.

The buyer's group, co-founded by tech titans such as Stripe and Google, has made an impressive contribution, allocating $550 million towards novel carbon removal ventures that aim to tackle the climate crisis head-on.

The facility at the heart of this transformative deal plays a critical role in waste disposal. Located in Norway, it burns a staggering 350,000 metric tons of waste annually, including food-soiled paper, cardboard, and non-recyclable plastics—material deemed residual waste under European Union regulations, which can neither be recycled nor reused.

The energy produced from this incineration fuels Oslo’s district heating system and generates electricity for the city. However, this process also releases significant amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Enter Frontier’s game-changing retrofit: the technology aims to capture an estimated 350,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, preventing its release into the air. Once captured, the carbon will be transported by ship to Europe’s Northern Lights sequestration site, where it will be stored permanently away from the atmosphere.

This deal goes beyond emissions reduction. It also includes carbon credits, specifically designed to offset biogenic emissions associated with the organic waste burned at the plant. Between 2029 and 2030, this project will deliver credits for the removal of 100,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, significantly contributing to global carbon reduction efforts.

Several of Frontier’s founding members, including Autodesk, H&M, JPMorgan Chase, and Salesforce, are key participants in this deal. Additionally, the city of Oslo and Norway’s Longship initiative are backing the retrofit with their own financial support.

“Frontier buyers are not only enabling this project to get off the ground but also validating a model that could be replicated through Europe, with the potential to remove tens of millions of CO2 from the atmosphere,” said Jannicke Gerner Bjerkås, director of carbon capture and storage and carbon markets for Hafslund Celsio, which owns the incineration plant. The company is Norway’s largest district heating provider. 

This move is part of a broader vision to retrofit similar facilities across Europe. At least 500 waste-to-energy plants across the continent provide district heating for cities, and many of these could eventually be equipped with carbon capture technology. According to Frontier’s estimates, retrofitting such facilities could capture an estimated 400 million metric tons of CO2 annually by 2050.

This initiative mirrors other efforts, such as Microsoft’s 10-year deal for carbon removal at a district heating system in Stockholm, where wood waste is burned in a process known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). As the European Union tightens its regulations on waste-to-energy emissions, the demand for such projects is likely to grow.

In light of tightening environmental regulations, European companies are increasingly considering carbon capture technologies for waste-to-energy facilities. Robert Höglund, CEO of the consulting firm Marginal Carbon and co-founder of CDR.fyi, highlighted the growing trend of EU regulations that may require these facilities to capture their emissions as part of Europe’s emissions trading system.

“Waste to energy [carbon capture and storage] is one of few viable approaches for plastic waste that can’t be recycled,” Höglund said. “The organic fraction of the waste is what determines how much [carbon dioxide removal] is generated; that fraction may go down with better sorting; that’s also a factor that may affect the economics of a project as CDR credits may be differently priced than fossil CO2.”