Norway funds world’s first full-scale carbon capture and storage project

Norway announced today that it will finance 16.8 billion kroner (US$1.8 billion) out of an estimated total investment of 25.1 billion kroner for the world’s first full-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) project.

The project is named Longship after the Viking ships.

The Norwegian government will fund the following:

• A carbon capture project at a cement factory in southern Norway, which is operated by Germany’s Heidelberg Cement.
• A project at a waste incineration plant in Oslo that is operated by Finland’s state-owned energy company Fortum (if Fortum can find external financial support, and Norway wants help from the EU for it). Fortum states on its website that the project “can annually remove as much pollution from the atmosphere as that of 60,000 cars.”

Both facilities plan to capture around 400,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Longship will also include the project Northern Lights, a joint venture between oil giants Equinor (EQNR.OL), Shell (RDSa.L), and Total (TOTF.PA) The Northern Lights project will transport liquid CO2 by ship from the capture plants to an onshore facility on Norway’s west coast, at Øygarden in Vestland County, for temporary storage. Northern Lights will then move the CO2 via a pipeline to a subsea reservoir in the North Sea. The three oil giants are responsible for planning the North Sea storage facility.

Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg said it was a “milestone” in the Norwegian government’s efforts to combat climate change:

The project will lead to emission cuts, and facilitate development of new technology and thus new jobs.

Minister of Petroleum and Energy Tina Bru said [via Offshore Engineer]:

Building bit by bit in collaboration with the industry has been important to us in order to be confident that the project is feasible. This approach has worked well, and we now have a decision basis. Longship involves building new infrastructure, and we are preparing the ground for connecting other carbon capture facilities to a carbon storage facility in Norway. This approach is a climate policy that works.

Longship is the greatest climate project in Norwegian industry ever. We will cut emissions, not progress.

Want to learn more about how carbon capture works? How Stuff Works has a great explainer on the process. Just click on this link to learn more about the technology, which isn’t actually new. Let us know what you think about carbon capture as a means of reducing emissions in the comments below.

Photo: The Norwegian Standard

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