Spokane to explore capturing carbon at its power-generating trash incinerator

Yahoo

28-01-2025

Jan. 27—An industrial-scale incinerator generating electricity by burning garbage is the largest producer of greenhouse gases controlled by the city of Spokane. Facing scrutiny from Olympia, city leaders are eyeing a costly study on technology to nab that pollution before it leaves the plant.
The Spokane City Council is considering a $650,000 study by CarbonQuest, a Spokane Valley-based carbon capture company that has primarily tested technology in large residential buildings in the northeast but is turning its eye to potential industrial applications. The study would be funded by the state using money generated by the very state program that threatens the facility's long-term viability.
The waste-to-energy facility is the only one of its kind in the state, and it's under the microscope of state leaders. The carbon cap-and-trade program of the Climate Commitment Act, which survived a citizen initiative in November, could hit the incinerator hard but notably exempts landfills. If the city starts having to pay into the cap-and-trade program for the facility's emissions in 2027, it could come with a cost of $2.5 million to $8 million each year.
The city successfully lobbied the Legislature in 2023 to fund an emissions life-cycle analysis comparing the facility to landfills, which showed that burning the garbage releases more CO2 than burying it — but not when factoring in the electricity generated, recyclable metals pulled from the ash and other factors.
The Legislature still hasn't agreed to an exemption, however, leaving the city with dwindling time to avoid a potentially devastating cost to maintain the waste-to-energy facility. However, funds generated by the carbon credit market were set aside to fund a study of whether it will be feasible to install carbon capture technology at the waste-to-energy facility.
The facility's emissions are not minor: emissions from within city limits were estimated at around 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents in 2019, of which nearly 100,000 metric tons or 5% are generated by the waste-to-energy facility.
Capturing a significant fraction of these emissions would be a notable project in the nascent field of carbon capture, which has existed for decades at small scale and with limited success but is projected to become a trillion-dollar industry by 2050. Success in Spokane could serve as a case study for waste-to-energy facilities across the country and potentially abroad, said Anna Pavlova, senior vice president for strategy, market development and sustainability.
"The waste to energy industry in general hasn't seen much carbon capture, even though that's seen as the one solution to their carbon emissions," Pavlova said. "Our hope is we can demonstrate it's feasible, we can capture emissions, we can continue the plant running — because otherwise that garbage will go into a landfill — and we want to use that as a case study for other companies."
If approved by the City Council, the study would determine the viability of carbon capture at the waste-to-energy facility, draft up designs and explore the best ways to dispose the concentrated CO2 once it's been removed. Eastern Washington is well-suited to potential disposal methods, including storage of CO2 in wells deep in basalt or possible use of natural magnesium formations that can turn the carbon into a solid mineral such as magnesite, allowing it to be stored permanently, Pavlova added.
It is less likely there is a current local market where the CO2 could be sold for industrial purposes, Pavlova noted. CarbonQuest's projects in New York state have been able to move the captured CO2 for use in concrete, where it can be both locked up permanently and put to commercial use, but Washington currently lacks the carrots and sticks that make that market viable, she added.
But city officials still project optimism about the potential prospects, whether for selling CO2 for use in concrete, fertilizer or sustainable aviation fuel, a potential use being explored by startup Twelve with their pending plant in Moses Lake. Even sequestering the carbon without further commercial use could be a financial boon for the city, opening up potential tax credits, noted Marlene Feist, the director of the city's public works division, which oversees solid waste operations including the waste-to-energy facility.
The study also implicitly dares the state to blink: If regulators heavily fine Spokane's facility, there won't be money to consider carbon capture technologies that could run into the tens of millions of dollars in construction costs, nor will a facility under fire by the state be attractive for potential grants, Feist noted.
On the other hand, however, there's no guarantee the project will move beyond the study stage if the state does exempt the waste-to-energy facility from having to purchase carbon credits, though Feist said city leaders want to see it happen.
"We would like to, but we're talking about tens of millions of dollars," Feist said. "This kind of investment can happen, but it takes time and planning to do so. Whether we have the exact answer from this study, we don't know, but maybe we have a roadmap."