Wastewater Treatment in Cold Climates: Inside Veas’ Bold Innovation Strategy with CEO Kjetil Wang Hansen

Running a wastewater treatment facility in one of the coldest corners of Europe isn’t for the faint-hearted. For Norway’s largest treatment plant, Veas, it’s business as usual — and under the leadership of CEO Kjetil Wang Hansen, it’s also becoming a testbed for some of the most exciting resource-recovery and low-carbon innovations in the sector.

In this episode of the Exec Exchange, Kjetil joins Piers to talk about Veas’ unique operating environment, the evolution of Norway’s wastewater sector, and why the old assumption that “cold climates slow everything down” simply doesn’t hold true anymore. With wastewater travelling 40 kilometres through a deep, geothermally tempered tunnel before reaching the plant, Veas benefits from a stable year-round temperature — and then turns that stability into value. Around 110 GWh of heat is sold annually into Oslo’s district heating system, covering roughly 10% of winter demand.

But temperature is only one piece of the puzzle. Kjetil walks us through Veas’ fast-cycle chemical treatment process — a “Formula One” approach that completes in three hours what conventional activated sludge might take a day to achieve. He also shares how the team manages solids through digestion, lime treatment and, soon, a full Cambi SolidStream system designed to boost biogas production by around 15%. And the innovation doesn’t stop there: Veas will soon be upgrading and capturing CO₂ for permanent geological storage through Norway’s Northern Lights project, transforming biogas operations into a genuinely climate-positive system.

For a utility serving just under a million people with a team of around 100, the scale of ambition is striking. As Kjetil puts it, one piece of career advice has stuck with him: “You have to think big.” At Veas, that mindset is now shaping plans for a future regional treatment plant built beyond the mountain and scaled for long-term resilience.

This episode offers a rare look into how a mid-sized utility, operating under tough climatic constraints, can embrace engineering ingenuity, regulatory change and circular thinking to set a new standard for wastewater treatment in Europe. A must-listen for leaders exploring energy-positive operations, cold-climate optimisation, or bold organisational transformation in the water sector.