On the shores of an island off Norway’s North Sea coast, engineers are building a burial ground for unwanted greenhouse gases.
The future terminal will pump tons of liquefied carbon dioxide from factory smokestacks across Europe into cavities deep beneath the seabed.
The project in the western community of Oygarden aims to prevent the gas from escaping into the atmosphere and contributing to global warming.
It “is the world’s first publicly accessible transport and storage infrastructure, enabling any emitter that has tracked its CO2 emissions to deliver that CO2 for safe handling, transport and permanent storage,” said project manager Sverre Overa to AFP.
As the planet struggles to meet its climate goals, some climate experts are seeing the technique, dubbed carbon capture and storage, or CCS, as a way to partially reduce emissions from fossil fuel-based industries.
Norway is the largest hydrocarbon producer in Western Europe, but also offers the best prospects for CO2 storage on the continent, particularly in its depleted oil fields in the North Sea.
The government has funded 80 percent of the infrastructure and put 1.7 billion euros ($1.7 billion) on the table as part of a broader state plan to develop the technology.
A cement factory and a waste-to-energy plant in the Oslo region are to send their CO2 to the site.
But the most original feature of the project lies on the commercial side: inviting foreign companies to keep their CO2 pollution safe.
– Piping plans –
Using CCS to curb carbon pollution isn’t a new idea, but despite generous subsidies, the technology never caught on, largely because it’s so costly.
One of the world’s largest carbon capture plants at the Petra Nova coal-fired power plant in Texas was mothballed in 2020 because it was not economical.
According to the industry-run Global CCS Institute, there are only a few dozen CCS projects in operation worldwide.
But a failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with Paris Agreement targets and a massive influx of government subsidies have breathed new life into the technology.
Energy giants Equinor, TotalEnergies and Shell have launched a partnership, dubbed Northern Lights, which will be the world’s first cross-border carbon transport and storage service when it launches in 2024.
A pipeline will inject the liquefied CO2 into geological pockets 2,600 meters below the sea floor, and the idea is that it will stay there forever.
On Monday, the Northern Lights partners announced a first cross-border commercial agreement.
From 2025, 800,000 tons of CO2 will be captured annually in a plant owned by the Norwegian fertilizer manufacturer Yara in the Netherlands, shipped to Oygarden and stored there.
On Tuesday, two energy companies – Norwegian oil and gas giant Equinor and Germany’s Wintershall Dea – announced a project to bring carbon dioxide captured in Germany to Norway’s offshore storage site.
If confirmed, the partnership between Equinor and Wintershall Dea could include the construction of a 900-kilometer pipeline connecting a carbon capture facility in northern Germany to storage sites in Norway by 2032.
A similar project with Belgium is already in progress.
– No ‘right solution’ –
In the first phase of the Northern Lights program, 1.5 million tons of CO2 can be processed per year, later between five and six million tons.
But that’s just a tiny fraction of annual CO2 emissions across Europe.
According to the European Environment Agency, the European Union emitted 3.7 billion tons of greenhouse gases in 2020.
Many climate experts warn that carbon capture is not a silver bullet for the climate crisis.
Critics warn that CCS could prolong fossil fuel extraction as the world tries to move towards clean and renewable energy.
Greenpeace Norway’s Halvard Raavand said the campaign group has always opposed this practice.
“In the beginning it was very easy to reject all kinds of CCS (carbon capture and storage) and now of course it’s a more difficult debate due to the lack of climate action,” he said.
“That money should instead be spent on developing (some) suitable solution that we know about (it works) that could lower electricity bills for ordinary people, such as: B. the insulation of houses or solar panels.”
