On Monday, 5 December, Aalborg Portland officially inaugurated a new pilot plant for CO2 capture. In collaboration with researchers from DTU and with support from the Innovation Fund, Aalborg Portland will now gain its first experience with CO2 capture from cement production.
Climate-friendly cement is essential
– It is a big day and a historic milestone for Aalborg Portland. We can now start capturing CO2 from cement production here in Denmark. Cement is an indispensable construction material used in everything from buildings to large infrastructure projects. Therefore, we must create a more climate-friendly cement production. Here CO2 capture will play an essential role because it is simply not possible to produce cement without releasing CO2, explains Søren Holm Christensen, CEO at Aalborg Portland A/ S, and continues:
Great expectations
– The experiences we gain in collaboration with DTU will be decisive for Aalborg Portland’s green transition. Therefore, it is also an enormously important step that we are taking with the commissioning of this pilot plant, and we have high expectations for the results.
Aalborg Portland is working purposefully towards 2030 to reduce its CO2 emissions by 1.6 million tonnes. The cement group has set a ceiling on CO2 emissions of 600,000 tonnes in 2030, regardless of activity level, corresponding to a reduction of 73 per cent of current emissions. Here, CO2 capture must play an important role and deliver a CO2 reduction of 400,000 tonnes annually. And there is something to catch up on because, with just over 2 million tonnes of CO2 emitted in 2021, the company is by far Denmark’s largest CO2 emitter.
Tested until October 2023
DTU is one of the research institutions in the world that has the most experience with CO2 capture, and here they have developed the mobile facility that is now installed at Aalborg Portland’s largest cement kiln. The plant, which can capture up to 1 ton of CO2 per day, is planned to be tested at Aalborg Portland until October 2023, and it must thus form the basis for establishing a full-scale plant.
– With this project, we will develop new technology that will reduce CO2 emissions and contribute to significantly more climate-friendly cement production in Denmark. That is why it is also fantastic and completely unique that we are now launching this project at a company that plays such a big role on the climate agenda, says Associate Professor at DTU Chemical Engineering and head of the project, Philip Loldrup Fosbøl, and elaborates:
Uses surplus heat
– At the same time, it is a new setup where we can utilize excess heat from the cement production itself to operate the CO2 capture plant to a certain extent. This way, we can also save a large amount of electricity when the plant is fully operational.
The project, which is named CORT and is part of the mission-driven partnership INNO-CCUS, has, in addition to DTU, Aalborg Portland and the Innovationsfonden, also 51 other partners, including Aalborg University, Ørsted and Pentair. CORT has a total budget of almost 2.7 million euros and is supported by the Innovation Fund with 1.750 million. Buildings, bridges and roads account for almost a third of Denmark’s total CO2 emissions.
