The Danish capital city will not be able to reach its ambitious climate goal of carbon neutrality after its iconic incinerator failed to meet CO2 capture requirements for state funding.
Municipal leaders said that the goal of a carbon-neutral Copenhagen by 2025 is no longer realistic after the Amager Resource Centre (ARC) incinerator abandoned a bid for state aid to build a plant to capture the CO2 it emits.
To become 100% carbon-neutral, the city said it would need the ARC incinerator to access part of the government’s DKK 8 billion (€1.07 billion) Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) fund.
However, the company does not satisfy certain equity capital requirements to be eligible for funding, according to energiwatch.dk.
ARC already had a demonstration plant up, which has captured some of the CO2 the incinerator emits, and a larger plant will be set up next year. The company’s plan was to set up a large-scale plant in 2025 that could filter all the CO2 out of the smoke rejected by the ARC incinerator.
“It’s a shame we won’t reach it by 2025. But that’s not the same as saying we won’t make it by 2026, 2027, or 2028. So there is still hope that we will,” declared Mayor, Sophie Hæstorp Andersen, adding that Copenhagen had reduced CO2 emissions by 80% since 2009.
The city’s head of the Technology and the Environment Committee, Line Barfoed, expressed her disappointment that the state has set criteria that the ARC waste plant was unable to meet.
“They set criteria to get a share of the state funding to develop CO2 capture technology when they knew in advance that the ARC waste facility in Copenhagen could not meet them. We simply hadn’t imagined that,” she told DR.
Despite Copenhagen not meeting its objective, the country remains a leader in decarbonisation. While the EU Green deal aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030 and to become climate neutral by 2050, Denmark set a much more ambitious goal at national level.
According to the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the country will have reduced its CO2 emissions by 70% in 2030 and become carbon neutral as planned in 2050.
