Tech company Microsoft announced an agreement to purchase 1.1 million tons of permanent carbon removals over a 10-year period.

The agreement was signed with Hafslund Celsio, which has been commercially successful with its full-scale CCS project in Oslo. Hafslund Celsio, Norway’s largest waste-to-energy and district heating company, is a provider of permanent carbon removals.

As part of the Norwegian Longship project, Hafslund Celsio is adding carbon capture to Norway’s largest waste-to-energy plant, making it one of the world’s first carbon capture projects in the waste management industry and part of a full value chain from capture to permanent storage. 

The plant will start capturing CO2 from 2029. The captured CO2 will be permanently stored by Northern Lights beneath the seabed on the Norwegian continental shelf.

The facility will capture about 350,000 tons of CO2 annually, and about half of this CO2 will come from biogenic sources like unsorted food waste with the remainder coming from fossil origin sources like non-recyclable plastic. Only the biogenic portion, as measured using a well-established radiocarbon analysis, will create carbon dioxide removals, while the fossil portion will reduce the City of Oslo’s annual emissions by 20%.

“Hafslund Celsio’s project turns waste into valuable carbon dioxide removal, while providing the city of Oslo with heating and helping Norway meet its climate goals”, said  Brian Marrs, senior director, energy and carbon removal, Microsoft, in a statement. “We appreciate Hafslund Celsio’s central role in Project Longship and are pleased to see this project develop.”   

Waste-to-energy with carbon capture and storage is a three-in-one solution for handling pre-sorted residual waste with no alternative use by solving society’s challenge of non-recyclable waste, providing carbon-free energy through utilization of the excess heat, and removing CO2 from the atmosphere by capturing and permanently storing biogenic CO2.