Even these plants struggle to make the process pay: usually they do so by pumping the CO2 back into oil fields, to increase the pressure underneath oil deposits and make them easier to produce, which obviously defeats any decarbonisation purpose.
High-risk
Cory’s Belvedere plant is not the only one plagued by doubts that CCS can work. Almost all projects proposed in the UK have been “delayed, cancelled or undisclosed”, the energy consultancy Ember reported, scathingly, in November.
“No project has moved beyond the pilot phase or begun construction. No carbon has been captured at commercial scale”, it remarked.
The stakes are highest with waste-to-energy plants like Cory’s, because they belch out even more carbon dioxide per unit of electricity generated than coal-fired power stations, as UN Environment Programme and European Union researchers have shown.
The answer, campaigners for a circular economy say, is to switch resources into reducing the volume of waste, and sorting what is unavoidable.
Investment in incinerators, and CCS for them, is an “expensive, high-risk distraction” from other more effective approaches, a report by Zero Waste Europe and Only Solutions showed. “Do not build” should always be top of the policy hierarchy, they argued: bad as landfill is, sending plastic and/or biostabilised waste there is better than burning it.
Frustrate
Further research by Zero Waste Europe and Equanimator showed that sorting mixed waste is “always swift and cost-effective” and a “lower-regret solution with much less potential for lock-in”.
Another giant question mark looms over the proposal to liquefy the captured CO2 at Belvedere and ship it to Yorkshire’s east coast, for burial under the North Sea by Viking CCS.
Viking, sponsored by Harbour Energy, Associated British Ports and the oil company BP, could be eligible for subsidies under Track 2 of the government’s £22 billion Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage (CCUS) programme. A Front End Engineering and Design (FEED) report has been commissioned, and a final investment decision, expected in 2025, was not taken.
And officials at the Competition and Markets Authority have, potentially, thrown a spanner in the works: their 2024 report on the Waste Industrial Carbon Capture scheme, under which Cory hopes to receive funding, says projects using non-pipeline transport – such as Cory’s ships – should not be considered.
A government consultation on non-pipeline transport, running until Friday, 1 May 2026, could further frustrate Cory.
Store
On top of that, carbon capture researchers say that the oil industry is dangerously exaggerating the potential for undersea storage of greenhouse gases.
Studies of two apparently successful projects, Sleipner and Snohvit in the North Sea off Norway, show that “the security and stability of the two fields have proven difficult to predict”, reported IEEFA, drawing together conclusions from multiple research papers.
“Each CCS project has unique geology”; “geologic storage performance for each site can change over time”; and “high quality monitoring and engineering response is a constant ongoing requirement”.
All this “calls into question the long-term technical and financial viability of the concept of reliable underground carbon storage”.
The two Norwegian fields bury only 1.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. Nevertheless, Viking says that it can store “up to 10mt of CO2 annually by 2030”.
Grandiose
Cory’s claim that its new plant, complete with CCS, will produce enough electricity to power 371,000 homes appears to be exaggerated.
Cory’s existing Riverside 1 incinerator, and Riverside 2, which is under construction, could together burn 1.5 million tonnes of waste per year. And that could produce about 1,230 gigawatt hours (GWh) per year of electricity.
About one tenth of that electricity would run the two incinerators. And between a third and a half would power the energy-intensive process that captures CO2 – plausibly leaving between 488 GWh and 734 GWh to go to the grid.
Assuming, as Cory does, that an average home uses 2800 kWh in a year, there would be enough for, at most, 262,000 homes, or, more likely, 175,000 homes – less than half the 371,000 that Cory claims.
Cory also says that up to 300,000 London homes could receive heat via a grandiose plan to pipe it from Riverside. But this idea, first mooted in a simpler version more than a decade ago, is still nowhere near construction.
Dependency
Far more certain is the damage the CCS plant would do, if built, to the Crossness Nature Reserve next to the incinerator, a remnant of ancient marsh grazing land and home to a cornucopia of wildlife.
In giving the go-ahead to the CCS project with a Development Consent Order (DCO), the government admitted its “great negative weight” on the reserve – but rejected calls by the Save Crossness Nature Reserve campaign and others to disallow expansion.
Cory’s speculative CCS project could end up just facilitating expansion of incinerator capacity – when any serious climate policy, and any rational waste management regime, would seek to reduce it.
This is part of an international trend: a waste-to-energy sector that, “at odds with the circular economy”, relies on an increasing volume of waste and creates a “scramble for waste”, as the Transnational Institute put it.
This model “creates a dependency on waste, which runs counter to the principle of waste avoidance” and “stands in direct contrast to recycling initiatives”.
Municipalities
Shlomo Dowen of the UK Without Incineration Network (UKWIN) said in an interview that incinerator overcapacity stimulates demand for supposedly “residual” waste, most of which can and should be sorted and/or recycled.
He added: “This is being exacerbated by industries such as sustainable aviation fuel and cement kilns, that are now competing with incinerators for this waste.”
Dowen added that, although the corporations that dominate waste management treat its composition as a commercial secret, it is clear that “once you take plastics and food waste out of municipal solid waste, there is not much left to burn”.
Environment department monitoring shows that, of total residual household waste in England, an estimated 53 per cent is readily recyclable, 27 per cent per cent potentially recyclable, 12 per cent is potentially substitutable and only eight per cent is difficult to either recycle or substitute.
The rapid rise of waste incineration took root during the drive to emasculate local government in the 1990s, Vera Weghmann argues in a report for the European Public Service Union. Municipalities were encouraged to turn the expanding waste business over to private partners.
Burned
Incinerators require minimum feedstock to work, and local councils across the continent were tied into deliver-or-pay contracts. Countries including Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands even became dependent on waste imports.
Private waste management is an ever-heavier burden on cash-strapped local authorities. When Sheffield discovered that Veolia had been diverting recyclable waste to an incinerator, the council voted to scrap its 35-year contract with the multinational, but backed off when threatened with a high compensation claim.
Dowen of UKWIN said: “These contracts were brokered by government, and forced many local authorities into financial difficulties.” Municipalities, alarmed at the prospect of failing to meet targets for reducing waste deliveries to landfill, were seduced into signing the onerous contracts.
In 2028 fossil-fuel-origin waste, such as plastics, is due to be added to the Emissions Trading Scheme, and a certificate will have to be bought for each tonne burned.
But waste management companies including Cory are already planning to pass that cost – totalling hundreds of millions of pounds per year across the UK – back to local authorities.
Loophole
Cory’s CCS project leans heavily on state funding. Before it was granted its DCO, company spokesman Matthew Fox told an inquiry that Cory will apply for a grant under the government’s £8.35 billion Waste Industrial Carbon Capture programme.
If it pre-qualified for support, Cory would then undertake further development before securing a contract award.
The Waste ICC programme would fund up to half of the capital cost of the scheme, plus some operational expenses, through a “contract-for-difference” mechanism, similar to that used to support renewable electricity generators. This would guarantee Cory an income from its sales of electricity, regardless of the market price.
Separately, Viking CCS may be eligible for state funding under the government’s CCUS support scheme.
The treatment of biogenic greenhouse gas emissions as zero-rated – an international regulatory loophole to which there is mounting opposition – means that Cory has its eye on another income stream: it can earn Greenhouse Gas Reduction credits by taking out of the atmosphere emissions produced by burning waste that starts out as biological matter such as wood, paper and food waste.
Toys
In emissions trading markets, Cory will be able to sell these credits to companies that need them to swap for fossil-fuel-origin emissions of their own – allowing both sides of the trade to provide more greenwash to their PR departments.
Cory did not respond to a request to comment on the points made. Nor did Viking CCS.
The extravagant government funding for fitting CCS to waste incinerators is a microcosm of the disastrous, corporate-driven global heating disaster.
Consumer goods manufacturers, food processors and supermarket chains generate mountains of single-use plastic, much of it unnecessary by any standard. In Britain, about 100 billion pieces end up as waste each year. On top of that is food waste of £17 billion each year, in the UK.
Instead of cutting down the waste mountain, corporations focus on undermining attempts to mandate reusable packaging. McDonald’s, having loudly promised in 2021 to stop making one billion plastic toys per year, last year said it will go back to “durable” plastic toys with Happy Meals.
Profits
Government, instead of standing up to climate-trashing sabotage and further reducing the flow of waste, piles obligations on cash-strapped local government to dispose of it.
Reuse, sorting and recycling are downgraded, whatever the government’s empty commitment to the “waste hierarchy” says.
Instead, those horrible piles of plastic are fed into incinerators – whose corporate owners claim to be “green” and even “zero carbon”, on the basis of plans, funded by the state rather than their shareholders, to fit carbon capture technology that does not work as efficiently as they claim.
Then, promises are made to ship some of these captured greenhouses gases, that need never have been generated in the first place, to Yorkshire, to be piped under the North Sea.
It is insane, but that is not all it is: the whole process is guided by the twisted, society-destroying logic of capital, which prioritises corporate profits above all. Each challenge to a part of that logic will work most powerfully as part of a challenge to the whole.
This Author
Dr Simon Pirani is honorary professor at the University of Durham in the UK, and author of Burning Up: A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption (Pluto, 2018). He writes a blog at People and Nature. You can follow Simon on BlueSky at @simonpirani.bsky.social.
This is an edited version of a longer article that first appeared at People and Nature. Visit the website for the full report.