Oslo —The world’s first business service providing carbon storage off Norway’s coast has carried out its inaugural CO2 injection into the North Sea seabed, the Northern Lights consortium working the positioning mentioned Monday.
The undertaking by Northern Lights, which is led by oil giants Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies, includes transporting and burying CO2 captured at smokestacks throughout Europe. The goal is to stop the emissions from being launched into the ambiance, and thereby assist halt local weather change.
“We now injected and saved the very first CO2 safely within the reservoir,” Northern Lights’ managing director Tim Heijn mentioned in an announcement. “Our ships, amenities and wells are actually in operation.”
In concrete phrases, after the CO2 is captured, it’s liquified and transported by ship to the Oygarden terminal close to Bergen on Norway’s western coast.
STIAN LYSBERG SOLUM/NTB/AFP/Getty
It’s then transferred into giant tanks earlier than being injected via a 68-mile pipeline into the seabed, at a depth of round 1.6 miles, for everlasting storage.
Carbon seize and storage (CCS) expertise has been listed as a local weather instrument by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Local weather Change (IPCC) and the Worldwide Power Company (IEA), particularly for decreasing the CO2 footprint of industries akin to cement and metal which can be troublesome to decarbonize.
The primary CO2 injection into the Northern Lights geological reservoir was from Germany’s Heidelberg Supplies cement plant in Brevik in southeastern Norway.
However CCS expertise is advanced, controversial and dear.
With out monetary help, it’s at the moment extra worthwhile for industries to buy “air pollution permits” on the European carbon market than to pay for capturing, transporting and storing their CO2.
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Northern Lights has up to now signed simply three business contracts in Europe. One is with a Yara ammonia plant within the Netherlands, one other with two of Orsted’s biofuel crops in Denmark, and the third with a Stockholm Exergi thermal energy plant in Sweden.
Largely financed by the Norwegian state, Northern Lights has an annual CO2 storage capability of 1.7 million tons, which is anticipated to extend to five.5 million tons by the tip of the last decade.
Whereas efforts akin to Northern Lights are targeted on capturing carbon immediately from essentially the most highly-polluting sources — industrial smoke stacks — there have additionally been efforts launched to seize the gasoline from the ambient air, an much more controversial methodology.
Mark Jacobson, a Stanford College professor of environmental engineering, informed CBS Information earlier this yr that he was doubtful of the motivations for and the efficacy of each sorts of carbon seize, and he mentioned bluntly that “direct air seize just isn’t an actual answer. We should not have time to waste with this ineffective expertise.”
Jacobson thinks direct air seize, specifically, is a boondoggle, and extra effort ought to be targeted on switching to scrub vitality sources.
At present, the U.S. will get about 60% of its electrical energy from fossil fuels.
“You must take into consideration who’s proposing this expertise,” Jacobson mentioned. “Who stands to profit from carbon seize and direct air seize? It is the fossil-fuel corporations.”
“They’re simply saying, ‘Properly, we’re extracting as a lot CO2 as we’re emitting. Subsequently, we ought to be allowed to maintain polluting, preserve mining,” Jacobson informed CBS Information, including that his stance has not made him fashionable amongst many within the vitality sector.
“Oh, yeah, diesel individuals hate me, gasoline individuals hate me, ethanol individuals hate me, nuclear individuals hate me, coal individuals hate me. They do, as a result of I am telling the reality,” he mentioned. “We do not want any of those applied sciences.”
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