Case study: Stockholm BECCS

BECCS@STHLM is a CCS project storing CO₂ from a biomass power and heat plant in Stockholm, Sweden. The plant was built in 2016 for burning biomass. It now burns residues from the forest and forest industries – branches, tops, bark and sawdust – of which just under 60 per cent comes from Swedish forests. It does however import substantial amounts (just below 30 per cent) from the Baltics¹. It has also used coal, especially in 2018, when supplies of wood fuel were disrupted.

Power CCS is a big bet. After 50 years of CCS (Val Verde Texas started in 1972), and some 20 years of CCS as climate hype, there are only two big power plants that use CCS in the entire world. One of them is Boundary Dam in Canada. It burns coal, and some of the CO₂ is used for enhanced oil recovery. It has shown poor performance and high costs. Petra Nova in Texas was suspended in 2020, after three years of operation, for similar reasons. There is no natural gas power station anywhere that uses CCS.
Capturing carbon from biomass power is no simpler than it is from coal or gas power, and transport by ship to Norway will cost a lot more than dumping the CO₂ in a nearby oil well.

There is also no large-scale heat plant using CCS anywhere in the world, and obviously no combined power and heat plant, which involves more complex construction (more tubing, valves and heat exchangers) than “just” a power plant. The reason why combined power plants are built at all is that it saves fuel. A power plant has an efficiency of 30–60 per cent. A combined heat and power plant can have an efficiency of 90 per cent. But this is only possible if there is a large and simultaneous demand for hot water, such as a district heating system or nearby industry. For most power plants, it is not an option to use the heat. A district heating system is expensive to build. Combined heat and power is only efficient under certain assumptions. And it comes at a cost. It is not very flexible, as people want their homes warm regardless of whether the price of power is high or low. The hot water is of little use for half the year, and if buildings are well insulated it may only be useful for a few months.

Combined heat and power also means a lot of heat but less electricity.

As for the BECCS@STHLM project, it will produce even less electricity with the same amount of wood input, according to an email to Acid News from Stockholm Exergi, though no specific data was supplied.

When it applied for the project, 50 per cent of Stockholm Exergi was owned by Stockholm City Council and the other half by Fortum. Fortum is a Finland-based power, heat and gas company. In 2020, Fortum acquired Uniper, with the personal blessing of president Vladimir Putin². Uniper was essentially the dirty (fossil and nuclear) parts of German Eon, with the clean parts retaining the name Eon after a 2016 split. Fortum and Uniper have assets in Finland, the Baltics, Russia, Norway, Germany and Sweden, much of it fossil and nuclear. It is majority-owned by the government of Finland. Uniper is well known to the climate NGO community after it sued the Dutch government³ in 2021 over the country’s planned coal phase-out concerning its coal power plant Maasvlakte. It also claims to be Europe’s second-largest nuclear power producer. And it is one of the top CO₂ emitters, at 48.8 million tons in 2020.

Fortum sold its share of Stockholm Exergi on 30 June 2021 (to finance its acquisition of Uniper), but the new owners (pension funds) are unlikely to change their general strategy or the strategic focus on CCS. Fortum Oslo has a similar ownership (half-owned by Oslo city) and applied to the Innovation fund for CCS from its mixed waste CHP plant; it did not qualify in the first call.

Stockholm Exergi supplies Stockholm and adjacent towns with district heat, cooling and some electricity. It ran the nation’s only coal power (and heat) plant until 2020. They had to stop as the red-green government introduced a tax on fossil fuels for combined heat and power. The tax was implemented in spite of furious lobbying from Fortum/Stockholm Exergi and their allies. After they lost that battle, they immediately took credit for phasing out coal.

Stockholm Exergi now uses three sources of heat: mixed waste, biomass (mainly residues from the forest industry such as sawdust and chipped branches), and heat pumps.
The wood CHP plant was a step forward when it was conceived in the 2000s and commissioned in 2016. Bioenergy was accepted as a major alternative to fossils and nuclear power by the political parties and NGOs from 1980 until recently.

Sweden is a large country, largely covered with forests. It also has a strong forestry lobby, dominated by paper and pulp companies and forest owners.
Biomass is seen as CO₂-free in national climate targets and in reports to the EU and UN. The rationale is that if the biomass is not used, it will emit its carbon contents into the atmosphere anyway, or that the carbon released when the biomass is burned equals the carbon sucked up by growing trees.

Whether this is really true for a whole forest, including the soil and undergrowth, over a perspective of a few decades (for example until 2045, the Swedish net-zero target year) is widely debated, and the results also depend on what the forest products are used for. Paper usually emits its carbon within a year. Planks in buildings may store the carbon for several decades.

The biomass “carbon neutrality” accounting principle had at least the advantage of being simple.

But Sweden used the Kyoto Protocol and its Land Use and Land Use Change (LULUCF) articles 3.3 and 3.4 to subtract 2.13 million tons per year because the forest carbon growth is larger than the carbon content of the felled trees, every year.

Sweden now intends to use BECCS as a principal means of attaining its (national) net-zero 2045 target, and the Stockholm Exergi project is likely to receive large sums of money from the Swedish government as well as from the EU.

CO₂ from biomass is currently accounted for as zero in the emissions trading system, so at present Stockholm Exergi will not save any money by not emitting it. At February prices the difference would be about €780 million over the first ten years in their balance sheets. A decision to go ahead, which was expected during 2023, is unlikely unless all decisions are cleared out.

Fredrik Lundberg

1 Source: email from Stockholm Exergi to Acid News 2022-02-22
2 Reuters,11 Junes 2019, Fortum CEO discussed Uniper investment restriction with Russia's Putin https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uniper-m-a-fortum-russia-idUSKCN1TC1EX
3 Uniper press release 16 April 2021, https://www.uniper.energy/news/uniper-seeks-judgement-for-the-future-of-...