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Norway has started work on the Longship Project, a € 1.7 billion project that could bury large amounts of captured carbon under the North Sea in an attempt to slow climate change.
Dubbed Project Longship, the initiative will inject carbon dioxide captured from factory emissions into depleted oil and gas fields.
The carbon capture and storage (CCS) project could eventually see a total of 1.25 billion tonnes of CO2 sequestered in old fossil reserves at the bottom of the sea. The first phase of the project is expected to be completed by by 2024, when the capacity will reach 1.5 million tonnes per year.
“Industry players are now well advanced in the work,” said Tony C Tiller, State Secretary at the Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy.
“The first contracts were outsourced to Skanska, Aker, Kvaerner and more,” he told Dezeen. “The Ministry of Petroleum and Energy has approved a development, construction and operation plan for the storage part of the Longship project.
Longship project is part of Norway’s plan to become carbon neutral
The project is part of Norway’s commitment to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which requires signatories to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 in order to give the world a chance to limit global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Norway expects the program to help it deliver on its commitment to become carbon neutral by 2050 while generating thousands of new jobs in the process.
Tiller said there was “no guarantee” that the project would be successful, but said CCS is “absolutely necessary” if the world is to avoid uncontrollable climate change.
“There are no guarantees but we know that carbon capture and storage is absolutely necessary for Europe and the world to meet the temperature targets of the Paris Agreement,” he said.
But he added: “However, the success of this project depends on other projects and countries following suit. Other countries need to support CO2 capture and storage as a relevant climate measure.”
The project aims to encourage the CSC
The project aims to revive the CCS market by developing technologies and reducing the cost of capturing and storing atmospheric CO2, which is the main driver of climate change.
“The current market situation does not provide sufficient incentives to implement and develop CCS,” says the Norwegian government’s white paper on the Longship project, which was published in December last year.
“This is in part due to the high investment costs, the potential for low short-term income and the high risk,” the document continues. “In addition, the price of greenhouse gas emissions is lower than the cost of CCS, and the development of technology can have the characteristics of a public good.
“Longship will demonstrate that CCS is safe and feasible and will facilitate learning and cost savings in subsequent projects,” Tiller told Dezeen. “The infrastructure will be developed with additional capacity that other projects can use. Therefore, the threshold for establishing new carbon capture projects will be lowered.
Heidelberg Cement among industrial partners
Northern Lights, the organization responsible for transporting the greenhouse gas and storing it under the sea, is in talks with potential industrial partners who will capture the CO2 to be shipped to the North Sea and then pumped into bedrock.
“Northern Lights is in dialogue with 60 potential customers who want to decarbonize the industry in Europe,” Tiller said. “Earlier this year, draft trade agreements for CO2 storage were sent to 15 companies.
The cement manufacturer Heidelberg Cement is one of the first industrial partners in the project. It plans to convert its Slite cement plant on the Swedish island of Gotland into a carbon neutral plant, capturing all greenhouse gas emissions from its smokestacks and converting them to liquid CO2 before shipping them for underground storage.
However, this aspect of the project is in doubt due to a recent decision by the Swedish Supreme Land and Environment Court preventing the plant from renewing its limestone license.
“The situation in Sweden could at least call into question or postpone the CCS project to Slite,” said Per Brevik, director of alternative fuels at HeidelbergCement, in an interview with Dezeen last week.
“No contradiction” between Project Longship and the fossil fuel industry
The Longship project also aims to store the carbon captured directly in the atmosphere. Capturing the carbon that has already been emitted is a critical part of global decarbonization efforts. Indeed, the greenhouse gases emitted since the industrial revolution are already sufficient to ensure that temperatures will continue to rise for hundreds of years.
In March, Northern Lights signed a letter of intent with Swiss direct air capture company Climeworks. The company, which has developed machines that suck carbon from the atmosphere, could one day provide CO2 for storage as part of the project.
Tiller said there was “no contradiction” between Norway’s position as a major producer of fossil fuels and its efforts to develop the CSS sector.
“The oil sector in Norway is already facing tough climate measures such as quota obligations and a high CO2 tax,” he said. “Emissions per unit produced on the Norwegian continental shelf are significantly lower than the average for other countries. There is no contradiction between being an oil and gas producer and developing new climate technologies.
“It is the skills and capabilities of the oil and gas industry that make CO2 storage possible,” he added. He said the project does not involve enhanced oil recovery (EOR), a process by which fossil fuel companies inject captured CO2 into depleted reserves to extract the remaining oil and gas.
“Longship is a climate project and does not include EOR,” he said.
“More than 80 billion tonnes” of CO2 could be stored
The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate has prepared an atlas showing where CO2 could be stored on the Norwegian continental shelf. The country does not have suitable land-based sites, but the potential for storage under its North Sea territorial waters is vast.
“The atlas shows that more than 80 billion tonnes of CO2 can theoretically be stored on the continental shelf,” says the Project Longship white paper. “This matches Norway’s greenhouse gas emissions for over a thousand years.”
But he adds: “Such theoretical potential is uncertain and does not take costs into account. The Petroleum Directorate has categorized a capacity of around 1.25 billion tonnes of CO2 as the expected quantity for efficient and safe storage.
Carbon revolution
This article is part of Dezeen’s Carbon Revolution series, which explores how this miracle material could be removed from the atmosphere and used on earth. Read all content on: www.dezeen.com/carbon.
The sky photograph used in the Carbon Revolution graphic is by Taylor van Riper via Unsplash.
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