World's First Commercial Carbon Storage Facility Opens

In Norway, they have now commenced operations by injecting CO2 deep under North Sea seabed.

Credit: Northern Lights

The project by Northern Lights, which is led by oil giants Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies, involves transporting and burying CO2 captured at smokestacks across Europe. The aim is to prevent the emissions from being released into the atmosphere, and thereby help halt climate change.

After the CO2 is captured, it is liquified and transported by ship to the Oygarden terminal near Bergen on Norway's western coast. It is then transferred into large tanks before being injected through a 68-mile pipeline into the seabed, at a depth of around 1.6 miles, for permanent storage.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology has been listed as a climate tool by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency, especially for reducing the CO2 footprint of industries such as cement and steel that are difficult to decarbonize.

Largely financed by the Norwegian state, Northern Lights has an annual CO2 storage capacity of 1.7 million tons, which is expected to increase to 5.5 million tons by the end of the decade. While efforts such as Northern Lights are focused on capturing carbon directly from the most highly-polluting sources - industrial smoke stacks - others are endeavouring to capture carbon dioxide directly from the ambient air.

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