The first commercial service of the world that offers carbon storage off the coast of Norway has carried out its inaugural Injection of CO2 in the North Sea Fund of the North Sea, the Consortium of Lights of the North that operates the site on Monday said on Monday.
The Northern Lights, led by oil, Equinor, Shell and Totalgies giants, implies transporting and burying the CO2 captured in smoostacks throughout Europe.
The objective is to prevent emissions from being released to the atmosphere and, therefore, helping to stop climate change.
“Now we inject and store the first CO2 safely at the reservoir,” said Northern Lights managing director Tim Heijn, in a statement. “Our ships, facilities and wells are now in operation.”
In concrete terms, after CO2 is captured, liquefy and transported by Bergen’s terminal on the western coast of Norway.
Then it is transferred to large tanks before being injected through a 110 -kilometer pipe (68 miles) at the bottom of the sea, at a depth of around 2.6 kilometers, for permanent storage.
Carbon capture and storage technology (CCS) has been listed as a climate tool by the UN Intergovernmental Climate Change Panel (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), especially to reduce the CO2 footprint of industries such as cement and steel that are difficult to decarbonize.
The first CO2 injection in the Lightts Northern geological reservoir was from the Heidelberg material cement plant in Germany in Brevik in southeastern Norway.
But CCS technology is complex and expensive. Without financial assistance, it is currently more profitable for industries to buy “pollution permits” in the European carbon market than to pay for capturing, transporting and storing its CO2.
Until now, Northern Lights has signed only three commercial contracts in Europe.
One is with a Yara ammonia plant in the Netherlands, another with two of Orsted’s biofuel plants in Denmark, and the third with an exergi stochamus thermal plant in Sweden.
Financed to a large extent by the Norwegian state, Northern Lights has an annual CO2 storage capacity of 1.5 million tons, which is expected to increase to five million tons for the end of the decade.
