Norway says it holds vast CCS potential

A Norwegian government official said October 5 the nation’s continental shelf can in theory sequester the equivalent of 1,000 years of carbon emissions.

Ingrid Solvberg, director general of the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD), said during a panel discussion with officials in the European Union that Norway had a leadership position in carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.

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Geological mapping conducted by the NPD shows there is the capacity to store as much as 80bn metric tons of CO₂ in the Norwegian continental shelf. CCS, she said, is and will remain a solution to removing carbon emissions from the atmosphere.

While the Norwegian economy is largely powered by renewables, the NPD believes that storage capacity is the equivalent of 1,000 years of total Norwegian emissions.

Norway's government said last month it was soliciting applications for the development of two new CCS sites on its continental shelf, setting December 9 as the deadline.

One of the locations is in the North Sea, where Norway's Equinor, France's TotalEnergies and Anglo-Dutch major Shell are already developing the Northern Lights project. The other is in the Barents Sea, where Equinor and its partners are considering blue ammonia production, which would require offshore CCS facilities.

Norway already operates Europe's biggest CCS projects at the Sleipner and Snohvit fields, where CO₂ extracted along with the natural gas is reinjected into reservoirs.