Norway is set to inaugurate Thursday the gateway to a massive undersea vault for carbon dioxide, a crucial step before opening what its operator calls the first commercial service offering CO2 transport and storage. The Northern Lights project plans to take CO2 emissions captured at factory smokestacks in Europe and inject them into geological reservoirs under the seabed. The aim is to prevent the emissions from being released into the atmosphere, and thereby help halt climate change. On the island of Oygarden, a key milestone will be marked on Thursday with the inauguration of a terminal built on the shores of the North Sea, its shiny storage tanks rising up against the sky. It is here that the liquified CO2 will be transported by boat, then injected through a long pipeline into the seabed, at a depth of around 2.6 kilometers (1.6 miles), for permanent storage. The facility, a joint venture grouping oil giants Equinor of Norway, the Anglo-Dutch Shell and TotalEnergies of France, is expected to bury its first CO2 deliveries in 2025. It will have an initial capacity of 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year, before being ramped up to five million tonnes in a second phase if there is enough demand. "Our first purpose is to demonstrate that the carbon capture and storage (CCS) chain is feasible," Northern Lights managing director Tim Heijn told AFP. "It can make a real impact on the CO2 balance and help achieve climate targets," he said. CCS technology is complex and costly but has been advocated by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), especially for reducing the CO2 footprint of industries like cement and steel, which are difficult to decarbonize. The world's overall capture capacity is currently just 50.5 million tonnes, according to the IEA, or barely 0.1 percent of the world's annual total emissions. In order to limit global warming to... |