Energy Efficiency, GHG Emissions - April 2, 2025
Frontier Buyers Partner for Waste Carbon Removal in Norway
Frontier, a group of companies that aims to accelerate the development of carbon removal technologies, announced a collaboration for adopting waste carbon removal in Norway.
Frontier facilitated offtake agreements with Hafslund Celsio — Norway’s largest supplier of district heating and owner/operator of Norway’s largest waste incineration plant in the outskirts of the capital, Oslo — to pay $31.6 million to remove 100,000 tons of CO2 between 2029 and 2030.
Frontier founders Stripe, Google, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability and members Autodesk, H&M Group, JPMorganChase, Workday, and Salesforce purchased as part of this round of offtakes. Aledade, Match Group, Samsara, SKIMS, Skyscanner, Wise, and Zendesk will also participate with purchases via Frontier’s partnership with Watershed.
Hafslund Celsio’s facility in Oslo processes around 350,000 metric tons of sorted residual waste annually. The facility incinerates the waste and the excess energy is used to produce electricity and heat. The incineration process results in two types of CO2 emissions: biogenic CO2 emissions from the burning of organic material like spoiled paper and cardboard and fossil CO2 emissions from the burning of inorganic materials like plastics.
Through this offtake, Hafslund Celsio will retrofit its waste incineration facility with a unit that captures both types of CO2 emissions. The CO2 will then be transported by ship to the Northern Lights facility for permanent geological storage. Hafslund Celsio estimates that it could capture up to 175,000 tons of biogenic CO2 emissions per year from this single facility, in addition to the 175,000 tons of fossil CO2 each year. Although the abated fossil emissions are not part of Frontier’s offtake, this retrofit offers notable additional decarbonization for the facility.
The CO2 capture retrofit project at Hafslund Celsio is enabled by the combined contributions of public and private actors. In addition to Frontier buyers ensuring reliable revenue for the project, the Norwegian government’s Longship program supports CO2 capture and storage at Northern Lights, while the City of Oslo provides financial investment.
“Waste-to-energy retrofitted with carbon capture is a no-brainer solution for managing pre-sorted, residual waste: it generates carbon-free energy and removes CO2 from the atmosphere,” said Hannah Bebbington, Head of Deployment, Frontier, in a statement. "Hafslund Celsio is set to become the first to do it, charting a path for the 500 waste-to-energy facilities across Europe to remove tens of millions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere.”
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