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New Energy World
New Energy World embraces the whole energy industry as it connects and converges to address the decarbonisation challenge. It covers progress being made across the industry, from the dynamics under way to reduce emissions in oil and gas, through improvements to the efficiency of energy conversion and use, to cutting-edge initiatives in renewable and low carbon technologies.
On the horizon: Norwegian CCUS vision soon to be made real
14/8/2024
8 min read
Feature
Despite cost overruns, Norway’s Northern Lights carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) project is heading towards start-up in 2025, with a first-phase capacity of 1.5mn t/y, rising to 5mn t/y in the second phase. That schedule puts the scheme in the running to be among Europe’s first large-scale CCUS projects to start up, reports New Energy World Senior Editor Will Dalrymple.
Plying the waters of the Baltic and the North Sea are four 7,500 tonne capacity bulk carriers with a special payload, liquefied CO2, in a first of a kind project whose genesis can be traced back 20 years or more. Calling at a Swedish cement plant, Dutch ammonia plant and two Danish biomass power plants, the special fleet will head north to Øygarden, western Norway. There, their cargo will be stored for a day and then pumped 100 km north-west and 2.6 km down under the Norwegian Continental Shelf into a porous saline aquifer, where they will remain.
Including liquefaction, this is the scope of Norway’s huge, and mostly publicly-funded, Longship project for carbon capture and storage (CCS). Its total investment, including Northern Lights, Brevik and Celsio, is at least NKr25.1bn ($2.27bn), of which 10 years’ operation amounts to NKr8bn ($0.72bn). Total state investment is estimated at NKr16.8bn ($1.52bn). Within that massive scope is the Northern Lights transport and storage project, run by a consortium of Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies.
In a 2020 press release announcing the Longship project, the Norwegian government pointed out decades of experience in CCUS, with a 1mn t/y project in the Sleipnir field (1996) and 700,000 t/y project in the Snøhvit (2008) field in Norwegian waters. Therefore, the safety and integrity of the CO2 storage process was not at risk, but it admitted that project economics and the difficulty of technical integration of project elements would be a different story.