Inside The “World First” Carbon-Negative District Heating Plant

So we're standing at Vetterverket where we have a test facility for capturing biogenic CO2 from a biocombined heat and power plant. It was a lot of late nights putting this together because we've done it in really short time. An amazing thing, it actually worked. Inside this facility sits the equipment to make Stockholm's district heating carbon negative. first. Imagine being able to take a hot shower. Know that you're simultaneously removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Well, according to the R&D team at Stockholm Exergy, that's essentially what this technology enables. The bioenergy carbon capture and storage system uses biomass as an energy source. Carbon dioxide is encaptured and permanently stored underground in rock formations during the conversion of biomass to energy. Normally that C2 would be released and part of the flow from the atmosphere and back to the atmosphere what we do here instead is that we want to break this flow capturing the co2 and then putting it permanently underground but what is unique here is that we can we take a lot of that energy into district heating recover heat basically from the process and that reduces the energy loss so normally when you talk about carbon capture processes and we are talking about energy losses in the range of 10-15 percent And what we can see here is that we can reduce that to 2 to 3 percent. Stockholm Xergi is co-owned by the utility company FORCHUM in the city of Stockholm. Its heating serves more than 800 ,000 customers, which is why technology like this will play a big role in the climate goals of Stockholm, which is home to about 1 million people overall. Plus, the energy providers said it will shut down its last coal plant in 2020. Sweden had a governmental inquiry. last year that was presented and this one showed that to meet the Swedish targets for reducing CO2 emissions we would require about 3 to 10 megatons of negative emissions per year and under that scenario all emissions are used so from cement from the energy system from transport you would have basically zero emissions by 2045 but you still have agriculture so if you want to have agriculture we have diffused emissions on methane and other diffuse emissions that comes from plowing the land and other things. Then you need to counter these emissions by removing CO2 from the atmosphere and that's why even to meet these national targets in Sweden we need technologies like the one behind me." But here's the thing. Stockholm is in an electricity crunch. The population is growing by about 40,000 every year and its electric grid reportedly can't keep up with demand. And some reports say Stockholm's green energy push is to blame. The grid is from the 1950s and it isn't wired to some power from the renewable sources to where it's really needed. New cables aren't expected for another decade, but I'm told new legislation could help. So it was that issue now it has been resolved by the government chasing some legislation allowing us to finance basically a guarantee that we as an energy provider can guarantee that we will supply 320 megawatt of electric power from our combined heat and power plants if required during winter time so that issue has been solved but also as we're looking at this carbon capture unit one of the main requirements that we had when we were selecting technology was that we should be able to close it down so there are the requirement for extra power in stockholm is about 40 to 300 hours per year during these hours we can stop the carbon delivering full electric power out to the customers and running the biomass combined heat and power plants as climate change neutral and the rest of the time when there is sent agreed congestion we can use the carbon capture so it's part also the design and the process selection now research seems to agree that carbon capture systems like this are critical to meet the demands outlined in the Paris agreement and the technology doesn't necessarily have to be implemented like this. Even if you if you don't want to do negative emissions just reducing emissions you could put this on a fossil process on a combined heat and power plant. Increasing in the same way that would be then you would have emission reduction so you you want to have negative emissions but you would have emission reductions and you could have it with very low energy penalty. People want to hear that somebody are actually trying to do something about climate change not only complaining about it happening doing something, that you're doing the right thing and of course that feels good.