In a world first, the Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy has opened up for applications for exploitation rights for subsea storage of carbon dioxide, JWN reports. Norway also recently announced that it will be going ahead with a project for carbon capture and storage (CSS) that will be the first in the world to be able to store CO2 waste from various industrial sources, according to Equinor. If the project is successful it will serve as a stepping stone for full scale international operations.

Norway's has been world-leading in developing carbon capture and storage since the Sleipner facility started storing a million tons of CO2 per year under the continental shelf more than 20 years ago. Now the country's ambition is an economically viable full value chain solution for CCS. When a complete commercial framework is realized Norway will be able to import CO2 for permanent storage.

The importance of rolling out CCS technology can hardly be underestimated. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth assessment of CCS estimates that the technology implies a 30% or more reduction in the price of stabilizing the climate. In a 2016 report commemorating the 20 years of operation of Sleipner, the International Energy Agency stresses that realization of CCS technology is essential to achieving even the least ambitious scenario of the Paris Agreement – a temperature increase limited to 2°C by 2050.

The Norwegian demonstration project will use ships to collect CO2 captured using different techniques from two industrial sources: Norcem’s cement plant in Brevik and Fortum Oslo Varme’s waste incineration plant in Oslo. With this fundamental infrastructure in place it will be possible to successively expand and attach other sources of captured CO2 to the network.

Source: nordic.businessinsider.com

Photo: Equinor