Norway on September 26 inaugurated the “gateway” to a massive CO2 storage facility, moving toward the launch of its first commercial CO2 transport and storage service.
The commercial CO2 transport and storage project in Norway, named Northern Lights, aims to capture CO2 emissions from industrial chimneys across Europe and pump them into geological reservoirs beneath the seabed. The project’s objective is to prevent emissions from entering the atmosphere, thereby helping to mitigate climate change.
CO2 transport and storage facility on Oygarden island. (Photo: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP).
The newly inaugurated “gateway” is essentially a facility located on Oygarden island, featuring 12 large, shiny storage tanks. Numerous pipelines surround these tanks, with one pipeline leading down to the North Sea. The CO2 from the tanks will travel through a 110 km pipeline before being pumped down to the seabed at a depth of approximately 2.6 km for permanent storage. The North Sea, with its depleted oil and gas fields and extensive pipeline network, is an ideal location for burying greenhouse gases.
The facility on Oygarden island is operated by a collaboration of Equinor (Norway), Shell (UK-Netherlands), and TotalEnergies (France), which plans to bury its first batch of CO2 by 2025. The facility will have an initial capacity of 1.5 million tons of CO2 per year, with the potential to increase to 5 million tons in the second phase if market demand is high.
“Northern Lights is a demonstration project that shows that carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a technically feasible solution,” commented project director Tim Heijn. He also noted that this is a tool that can help combat climate change.
CCS technology is complex and costly, but it has been endorsed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations (UN) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), especially to help reduce CO2 emissions from industries like cement and steel, which are difficult to decarbonize.
According to the IEA, the current global CO2 capture capacity stands at only 50.5 million tons, accounting for about 0.1% of the world’s total annual emissions. To limit global warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, CCS must prevent at least one billion tons of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere each year by 2030. However, this technology remains in its infancy and is progressing slowly due to high costs. The Norwegian government has funded 80% of the total cost of the Northern Lights project.
