A carbon capture project is being used to greenwash the expansion of one of the UK’s largest waste incinerators, at Belvedere, Kent.
Cory Topco, which owns one incinerator and is building another, says it will capture greenhouse gases from burning waste, liquefy them, and send them by ship to Yorkshire, to be piped under the North Sea and stored.
🔴 Cory promises to capture more than 90% of its incinerators’ greenhouse gas emissions – but no carbon capture plant on earth ever got close to that.
🔴 Cory has an agreement with Viking CCS to to offtake its captured carbon in Yorkshire and bury it under the North Sea – but there are doubts about how, and whether, that could work. Competition authority officials, who say non-pipeline schemes should not get government funding, could cause problems.
🔴 Cory claims it will generate electricity to power 371,000 homes – but is more likely to put less than half of that into the grid. The CCS plant would have a devastating impact, though – doing irreparable damage to the Crossness nature reserve.
🔴The incinerator expansion will encourage local authorities to send waste for burning that could be avoided or recycled, reinforcing fossil-heavy economic throughput and putting the impact-light “circular economy” ever further out of reach.
🔴 Cory hopes the project will be funded by the government’s multi-billion-pound carbon capture subsidy schemes – money that could be spent more effectively on genuine decarbonisation measures.
Doubts about Cory’s claims it can capture 90% of greenhouse gas emissions at Belvedere arise from carbon capture and storage (CCS)’s 40-year global history of failure.
Cory would use post-combustion carbon capture technology, that pulls carbon dioxide out of the flue gases (i.e. gases coming out of chimneys) with amine solvents.
Only one company in the world – SaskPower, which operates the Boundary Dam coal-fired power station in Saskatchewan, Canada – uses this method. In more than ten years of operation it has not once hit its target of capturing 90% of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Boundary Dam’s average capture rate was about 50%, not 90%, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found. Less than 65%, said separate analysis by Carbon Tracker.
Some CCS has higher capture rates, but only at gas processing plants, where the CO2 is easier to collect, because it comprises such a big proportion (up to 90%) of the flue gases. 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.
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.
Further research by Zero Waste Europe and Equanimator showed that sorting mixed waste is “always swift and cost-effective” – 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, but 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 1 May, could further frustrate Cory.
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”.
Cory’s claim that its new plant, complete with CCS, will produce enough electricity to power 371,000 homes is 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 1230 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. (See detailed estimates below, “Cory’s business model”.)
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.
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”.
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 – “and 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% is readily recyclable, 27% is potentially recyclable, 12% is potentially substitutable and only 8% 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.
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 (e.g. 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.
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 (mostly, wood, paper and food waste).
Cory’s business model
If Cory’s planned carbon capture project goes ahead then, according to the information the company has made public, it could look like this:
🔴 Each year, about 1.5 million tonnes of waste could be burned (750,000 to 850,000 tonnes from the Riverside 1 incinerator, judging by its throughput in recent years, and 650,000 tonnes from the new Riverside 2 incinerator.)[1]
🔴 From each 1.5 million tonnes of waste, we might expect 1.75 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to go into the atmosphere. Of the 1.75 million tonnes, about 850,000 tonnes would come from burning fossil-origin waste, including plastics, and about 900,000 tonnes from burning waste produced from biological material, including wood, paper and cardboard (biogenic waste).[2] This 900,000 tonnes would be treated as “zero carbon” by most methods for counting emissions, because when new trees and other plants are grown, carbon is removed from the atmosphere.
🔴 Most of the carbon dioxide emissions would be captured, compressed and liquefied. The liquid carbon dioxide would be transported by ship to Yorkshire, and buried by Viking CCS in an exhausted oil field under the North Sea. Cory reckons that the transportation and storage would put an extra 17,600 tonnes/year of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) into the atmosphere.[3]
🔴 The combustion of the waste would drive turbines to produce about 1230 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity per year. Of these, 127 GWh might be used to run the incinerators.[4] Anything between 369 GWh and 615 GWh (that is, 30-50%) could be needed to power the capture, compression and liquefaction of carbon, leaving between 488 GWh and 734 GWh to be exported to the grid. Estimates of the energy cost of capture, compression and liquefaction of CO2 at a waste-to-energy plant range from 30% to 50% of the electricity available.[5]
🔴Assuming (generously) that the electricity is supplied uniformly throughout the year, that’s a 56-84 MW power plant, perhaps one fifth of the size of a small-ish gas-fired plant. It’s about enough electricity to power between 175,000 and 262,000 homes – no more than 70%, and quite possibly less than half, of the 371,000 that Cory claims.[6]
🔴 Some energy could be captured in the form of heat, and added to a heat transfer system to households.
🔴 Money-wise, Cory’s incinerators will continue to receive revenue for the electricity generated, plus waste management fees (gate fees) – i.e. fees for accepting waste – paid under contracts by local authorities. The industry norm is that these contracts either require minimum volumes of waste to be delivered and fees paid by the local authority for any shortfall, or they specify a fixed capacity that will be reserved for the authority.
🔴 Cory envisages that much of the capital investment, and operating expenses, for carbon capture and storage will be funded by the government, under the Waste Industrial Carbon Capture Business Model.[7] The government intends to pay out such subsidies in the form of “contracts for difference”.[8]
🔴 In 2028 the government intends to add waste incineration to the emissions trading scheme (ETS), under which companies will have to pay the government for certificates to cover each tonne of fossil-origin carbon dioxide that they pump into the atmosphere. Cory has assured its shareholders that they need not worry: the company has already been “ensuring contracts include change-of-law provisions, and build ETS liabilities into pricing strategies” – in other words, charges for greenhouse gas emissions will be passed back to local authorities.[9]
🔴 For the proportion of waste burned that counts as biogenic, and is captured, Cory will receive Greenhouse Gas Reduction credits. As the company’s representative explained to a planning enquiry, these can be “sold to third party purchasers such as international tech companies, banks, or oil and gas majors, for the purposes of carbon offsetting”.[10]
Cory Topco, which owns one incinerator and is building another, says it will capture greenhouse gases from burning waste, liquefy them, and send them by ship to Yorkshire, to be piped under the North Sea and stored.
🔴 Cory promises to capture more than 90% of its incinerators’ greenhouse gas emissions – but no carbon capture plant on earth ever got close to that.
🔴 Cory has an agreement with Viking CCS to to offtake its captured carbon in Yorkshire and bury it under the North Sea – but there are doubts about how, and whether, that could work. Competition authority officials, who say non-pipeline schemes should not get government funding, could cause problems.
 |
| Crossness Nature Reserve, Belvedere, with the Cory incinerator in the background. Photo: Dudley Miles / Creative Commons |
🔴 Cory claims it will generate electricity to power 371,000 homes – but is more likely to put less than half of that into the grid. The CCS plant would have a devastating impact, though – doing irreparable damage to the Crossness nature reserve.
🔴The incinerator expansion will encourage local authorities to send waste for burning that could be avoided or recycled, reinforcing fossil-heavy economic throughput and putting the impact-light “circular economy” ever further out of reach.
🔴 Cory hopes the project will be funded by the government’s multi-billion-pound carbon capture subsidy schemes – money that could be spent more effectively on genuine decarbonisation measures.
Doubts about Cory’s claims it can capture 90% of greenhouse gas emissions at Belvedere arise from carbon capture and storage (CCS)’s 40-year global history of failure.
Cory would use post-combustion carbon capture technology, that pulls carbon dioxide out of the flue gases (i.e. gases coming out of chimneys) with amine solvents.
Only one company in the world – SaskPower, which operates the Boundary Dam coal-fired power station in Saskatchewan, Canada – uses this method. In more than ten years of operation it has not once hit its target of capturing 90% of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Boundary Dam’s average capture rate was about 50%, not 90%, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found. Less than 65%, said separate analysis by Carbon Tracker.
Some CCS has higher capture rates, but only at gas processing plants, where the CO2 is easier to collect, because it comprises such a big proportion (up to 90%) of the flue gases. 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.
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.
 |
| The carbon capture unit at the Boundary Dam power station in Canada. Photo: Implicit Matrix / Creative Commons |
Further research by Zero Waste Europe and Equanimator showed that sorting mixed waste is “always swift and cost-effective” – 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, but 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 1 May, could further frustrate Cory.
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”.
Cory’s claim that its new plant, complete with CCS, will produce enough electricity to power 371,000 homes is 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 1230 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. (See detailed estimates below, “Cory’s business model”.)
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.
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”.
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 – “and 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% is readily recyclable, 27% is potentially recyclable, 12% is potentially substitutable and only 8% 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.
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 (e.g. 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.
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 (mostly, wood, paper and food waste).
 |
Cory’s Riverside incinerator. Photo: Ross.Brown.Cory / Creative Commons |
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 issues raised here. Nor did Viking CCS.
In conclusion: extravagant government funding for fitting CCS to waste incinerators is a microcosm of the disastrous, corporate-driven global heating disaster.
Just think about it. Consumer goods manufacturers, food processors and supermarket chains generate mountains of single-use plastic, much of it unnecessary by any standard. In the UK, about 100 billion pieces end up as waste each year. On top of that is food waste: £17 billion worth of it 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 1 billion plastic toys per year, last year said it will go back to “durable” plastic toys with Happy Meals.
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.
Simon Pirani, 3 March 2026
==
Cory did not respond to a request to comment on the issues raised here. Nor did Viking CCS.
In conclusion: extravagant government funding for fitting CCS to waste incinerators is a microcosm of the disastrous, corporate-driven global heating disaster.
Just think about it. Consumer goods manufacturers, food processors and supermarket chains generate mountains of single-use plastic, much of it unnecessary by any standard. In the UK, about 100 billion pieces end up as waste each year. On top of that is food waste: £17 billion worth of it 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 1 billion plastic toys per year, last year said it will go back to “durable” plastic toys with Happy Meals.
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.
Simon Pirani, 3 March 2026
==
Cory’s business model
If Cory’s planned carbon capture project goes ahead then, according to the information the company has made public, it could look like this:
🔴 Each year, about 1.5 million tonnes of waste could be burned (750,000 to 850,000 tonnes from the Riverside 1 incinerator, judging by its throughput in recent years, and 650,000 tonnes from the new Riverside 2 incinerator.)[1]
🔴 From each 1.5 million tonnes of waste, we might expect 1.75 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to go into the atmosphere. Of the 1.75 million tonnes, about 850,000 tonnes would come from burning fossil-origin waste, including plastics, and about 900,000 tonnes from burning waste produced from biological material, including wood, paper and cardboard (biogenic waste).[2] This 900,000 tonnes would be treated as “zero carbon” by most methods for counting emissions, because when new trees and other plants are grown, carbon is removed from the atmosphere.
🔴 Most of the carbon dioxide emissions would be captured, compressed and liquefied. The liquid carbon dioxide would be transported by ship to Yorkshire, and buried by Viking CCS in an exhausted oil field under the North Sea. Cory reckons that the transportation and storage would put an extra 17,600 tonnes/year of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) into the atmosphere.[3]
🔴 The combustion of the waste would drive turbines to produce about 1230 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity per year. Of these, 127 GWh might be used to run the incinerators.[4] Anything between 369 GWh and 615 GWh (that is, 30-50%) could be needed to power the capture, compression and liquefaction of carbon, leaving between 488 GWh and 734 GWh to be exported to the grid. Estimates of the energy cost of capture, compression and liquefaction of CO2 at a waste-to-energy plant range from 30% to 50% of the electricity available.[5]
🔴Assuming (generously) that the electricity is supplied uniformly throughout the year, that’s a 56-84 MW power plant, perhaps one fifth of the size of a small-ish gas-fired plant. It’s about enough electricity to power between 175,000 and 262,000 homes – no more than 70%, and quite possibly less than half, of the 371,000 that Cory claims.[6]
🔴 Some energy could be captured in the form of heat, and added to a heat transfer system to households.
🔴 Money-wise, Cory’s incinerators will continue to receive revenue for the electricity generated, plus waste management fees (gate fees) – i.e. fees for accepting waste – paid under contracts by local authorities. The industry norm is that these contracts either require minimum volumes of waste to be delivered and fees paid by the local authority for any shortfall, or they specify a fixed capacity that will be reserved for the authority.
🔴 Cory envisages that much of the capital investment, and operating expenses, for carbon capture and storage will be funded by the government, under the Waste Industrial Carbon Capture Business Model.[7] The government intends to pay out such subsidies in the form of “contracts for difference”.[8]
🔴 In 2028 the government intends to add waste incineration to the emissions trading scheme (ETS), under which companies will have to pay the government for certificates to cover each tonne of fossil-origin carbon dioxide that they pump into the atmosphere. Cory has assured its shareholders that they need not worry: the company has already been “ensuring contracts include change-of-law provisions, and build ETS liabilities into pricing strategies” – in other words, charges for greenhouse gas emissions will be passed back to local authorities.[9]
🔴 For the proportion of waste burned that counts as biogenic, and is captured, Cory will receive Greenhouse Gas Reduction credits. As the company’s representative explained to a planning enquiry, these can be “sold to third party purchasers such as international tech companies, banks, or oil and gas majors, for the purposes of carbon offsetting”.[10]
References
[1] Cory says on its web site that the two plants together will be able to process more than 1.5 million tonnes of waste per year
[2] In its environmental statement, Cory forecasts that 95% of the CO2 emissions would amount to 1,651,780 tCO2 – so 100% would be 1,738,716 tCO2. It forecasts that 49% of the emissions would be from fossil sources. I have rounded the numbers for convenience. In 2017, Cory has reported the biogenic proportion of the waste at its plants as 54.1% (Cory Riverside Energy, A Carbon Case (2017), page 16). A report from the UN Environment Programme estimated that waste-to-energy plants typically emit 1000-1100 kg of emissions when 1000 kg of waste is burned. (UNEP, Waste to Energy: considerations for informed decision-making (2019), page 40.) A report by researchers working the EU estimated the emissions at 700-1700 kg per 1000 kg of waste burned (Best Available Techniques Reference Document for Waste Incineration (JRC Science for Policy Report), see page 152)
[3] Cory Environmental Statement: 6.1. Chapter 13. Greenhouse Gases. March 2024, pages 42-43
[4] This is based on Cory’s published figures for 2015, when 700,138 tonnes of waste went into the Riverside plant, and it generated 574.4 GWh, of which 59.2 GWh was used on site and 515.2 GWh exported. See Cory Riverside Energy: A Carbon Case (2017), page 13
[5] A review by the IEA Technology Collaboration programme concluded that the net electricity production of incinerators with CCS “would be almost halved due to the carbon capture energy requirement”. In 2021, environmental engineers estimated that adding CCS to the Amager Bakke incinerator in Copenhagen, would reduce electricity output from 615kWh per tonne of waste burned to 310kWh, while heat output would increase from 9.1 GJ to 9.5GJ. The incinerator’s owners applied for national government funding to add CCS equipment and that was rejected. A demonstration-scale project is now in progress at the plant. Researchers point out that the energy cost of CCS on incinerators will differ according to factors including the respective use of electricity and heat, the type of amine solvents used, and the type of construction of the plant
[6] I have assumed 2800 kWh per year per home, the same number that Cory uses in its A Carbon Case document
[7] Written summary of the applicant’s oral submissions at compulsory acquisition hearing 2 (EN010128), February 2025
[8] “Subsidy scheme details. The Industrial Carbon Capture Business Model”, Gov.UK
[9] Cory Topco 2024 Annual Report, page 37
[10] Written summary of the applicant’s oral submissions at compulsory acquisition hearing 2 (EN010128), February 2025
[2] In its environmental statement, Cory forecasts that 95% of the CO2 emissions would amount to 1,651,780 tCO2 – so 100% would be 1,738,716 tCO2. It forecasts that 49% of the emissions would be from fossil sources. I have rounded the numbers for convenience. In 2017, Cory has reported the biogenic proportion of the waste at its plants as 54.1% (Cory Riverside Energy, A Carbon Case (2017), page 16). A report from the UN Environment Programme estimated that waste-to-energy plants typically emit 1000-1100 kg of emissions when 1000 kg of waste is burned. (UNEP, Waste to Energy: considerations for informed decision-making (2019), page 40.) A report by researchers working the EU estimated the emissions at 700-1700 kg per 1000 kg of waste burned (Best Available Techniques Reference Document for Waste Incineration (JRC Science for Policy Report), see page 152)
[3] Cory Environmental Statement: 6.1. Chapter 13. Greenhouse Gases. March 2024, pages 42-43
[4] This is based on Cory’s published figures for 2015, when 700,138 tonnes of waste went into the Riverside plant, and it generated 574.4 GWh, of which 59.2 GWh was used on site and 515.2 GWh exported. See Cory Riverside Energy: A Carbon Case (2017), page 13
[5] A review by the IEA Technology Collaboration programme concluded that the net electricity production of incinerators with CCS “would be almost halved due to the carbon capture energy requirement”. In 2021, environmental engineers estimated that adding CCS to the Amager Bakke incinerator in Copenhagen, would reduce electricity output from 615kWh per tonne of waste burned to 310kWh, while heat output would increase from 9.1 GJ to 9.5GJ. The incinerator’s owners applied for national government funding to add CCS equipment and that was rejected. A demonstration-scale project is now in progress at the plant. Researchers point out that the energy cost of CCS on incinerators will differ according to factors including the respective use of electricity and heat, the type of amine solvents used, and the type of construction of the plant
[6] I have assumed 2800 kWh per year per home, the same number that Cory uses in its A Carbon Case document
[7] Written summary of the applicant’s oral submissions at compulsory acquisition hearing 2 (EN010128), February 2025
[8] “Subsidy scheme details. The Industrial Carbon Capture Business Model”, Gov.UK
[9] Cory Topco 2024 Annual Report, page 37
[10] Written summary of the applicant’s oral submissions at compulsory acquisition hearing 2 (EN010128), February 2025
