Danish District Heating ready with new proposals for optimizing CO₂ capture

On the day that Crown Prince Frederik gave the signal to start the first storage of CO₂, one of the major players in the field, the Danish District Heating Association, which represents Denmark's 354 district heating companies, comes up with a new proposal in which the organization presents a number of recommendations to fulfill the sector's great potential.

According to Danish District Heating, there is still no framework and coherent regulation in place to ensure a rapid and effective implementation of CO₂ capture in the Danish energy and supply sector. The recommendations of the organization's CCUS initiative are intended to remedy this.

The initiative's recommendations are intended to ensure that CO₂-emitting utilities can reduce emissions through CO₂ capture, contribute to the Danish climate goals and supply biogenic CO₂ for green fuels and negative emissions.

- We have enormous potential to deliver real CO₂ reductions that can contribute to us meeting our overall climate goals. It is absolutely crucial that we as a society fulfill this potential so that we can ensure not just a green energy and utility sector, but a completely green Denmark. However, this requires that we change the framework conditions of the supply sector and that is why we have brought the entire sector together in a proposal that focuses on the necessary solutions, says Kim Mortensen, CEO of Dansk Fjernvarme.

Can supply CO₂ for the production of green fuels

In the future, many of the world's planes, ships, trucks and industry will run on green fuels, which are produced at Power-to-X plants. Those plants need biogenic CO₂ for their processes, where the district heating sector can supply this from waste-to-energy and biomass plants.

- We estimate that the need for CO₂ from biogenic sources for the production of green fuels in 2050 will be between three and five million tons. Therefore, it makes good sense to establish CO₂ capture at waste-to-energy plants and biomass plants, where the CO₂ can be captured effectively, says Jannick Buhl, chief consultant at Dansk Fjernvarme.

Waste-to-energy plants in particular can contribute a large part of CO₂ reductions by establishing CO₂ capture at the plants. However, the new bill on exposing waste-to-energy capacity to competition puts this at risk, as the proposed competition model will lead to great uncertainty among waste-to-energy companies and prevent long-term investments.

- If a waste-to-energy plant is under competition and its existence is threatened by a political agreement that states that 30 percent must go bankrupt or close by 2030, then it will be very difficult to obtain financing for long-term and climate-friendly investments. This puts the companies in a strange limbo until 2030, when the interim target of 70 percent. CO₂ reduction must be achieved, says Jannick Buhl and concludes:

- Our clear recommendation is that it is best for the climate and consumer prices if the competition model is dropped and a clear and well-known framework is created, so that we can instead invest in exploiting waste energy's great potential for CO₂ capture.