Utility Week

24 | OCTOBER 2021 | UTILITY WEEK Policy & Regulation Analysis Getting to grips with water sector process emissions Ruth Williams talks to sector leaders about the water's industry's progress towards its self-set target of being net zero by 2030 – and especially what can be done about process emissions. W ater has long been overlooked in conversations about decarbonisa- tion despite being the fourth most energy-intensive industry in the UK. That changed in 2019 when – coordinated by Water UK – England's water companies com- mitted to becoming net zero by 2030, the first industry to do so. Water UK published its routemap to net zero last year, collaboratively written by the water and wastewater companies together with consultants Ricardo and Mott Mac- donald. It serves as a living plan setting the ambition of where the industry wants to reach this decade and some of the options for doing that. By 2030 the ambition is to lower emis- sions from operations by 60 per cent com- pared with the 2018/19 baseline. Offsetting will be used only where green- house gas emissions cannot be avoided. However, there is an acceptance in both the shared and individual company net zero plans that significant gains will not be made ahead of 2030 to lower process emissions from wastewater treatment and that these will need to be offset. David Riley, head of carbon neutrality at Anglian Water, explains that by 2030 more than 60 per cent of the company's emissions will be from processes. "As we put together the Water UK and our own Anglian plans, we recognised it's a huge mountain to climb – it's about behaviours, technology, innovation, systems we use for measurement," he says. Monitoring will be the first step towards having a better data set to work from and a number of projects are under way to meas- ure current emissions and compile mean- ingful data that can be used to calculate improvements. "Process emi ssions is the toughest nut to crack," Anthony Browne, energy and decar- bonisation manager at Northumbrian Water, says. Although these will be included in Northumbrian's even more ambitious target of reaching carbon net zero by 2027, Browne explains that they will be credibly offset by other renewable activities such as the ramp- ing up of renewably generated energy. He adds that although the company does not anticipate making significant reductions to processes this decade, it will account for them in the net zero value. "We're not turn- ing a blind eye to it but we're not anticipat- ing significant reductions by 2027," he says. The main unknown in process emissions is nitrous oxides – the level of emissions varies depending on the type of wastewater treatment plant and is affected by seasonal changes. Data from other parts of the world has been used by the UK sector to calculate averages, but mass monitoring of wastewa- ter treatment sites, especially larger ones, is essential to have a more realistic view of the level and location of emissions before these can be managed. Severn Trent is leading a bid in Ofwat's innovation fund for monitoring equipment to be deployed for reporting and understanding what mitigation strategies can be taken. Maria Manidaki, net zero technical lead at Mott MacDonald, says improvements can be made concurrently to gathering data from measuring. She tells Utility Week: "The most efficient way will be to monitor them for a few months to understand seasonality, cap- ture where they are. At the same time, when installing monitors, to make operational tweaks to reduce emissions while being

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