The Norwegian continental shelf offers a wealth of opportunities for new industries alongside and after oil, and carbon capture and storage (CCS) has gained a solid foothold. Northern Lights has started commercial storage, and interest in new CCS licenses is high.
Equinor aims to store 30 – 50 Mt of CO2 annually by 2035, roughly equivalent to Norway’s emissions (45 Mt of CO2 equivalent in 2024).
The company is involved in projects such as Northern Lights and Endurance in the North Sea, Bayou Bend in the USA and Kalundborg in Denmark, as well as a planned pipeline from the European mainland to the North Sea.
At the World CCUS Conference in Bergen in September, Andreas Jagtøyen, SVP of Renewable and Low Carbon Technology at Equinor, highlighted that CCS is the most cost-effective way to decarbonise industries where cutting emissions is challenging.
Equinor has been reinjecting CO2 at Sleipner since 1996 and at Snøhvit since 2008. Andreas pointed out that the company has so far stored more than 27 Mt of CO2 in the framework of these projects.
“It is promising and impressive,” he said at the conference, “but it took us 30 years. We need to increase the pace significantly to solve the challenges of the future.”
Andreas also stressed that CCS must become economically sustainable if we are to reach the zero emissions targets, and that high costs are a barrier.
“The EU ETS price (EU climate quota price) is currently just under 70 €/t, lower than the actual capture costs. 50 – 70 % of CCS costs are related to capture.”
He called for collaboration between academia and operators to reduce costs, but also pointed out that on the transport and storage side, citing Northern Lights as an example, costs (about 75 €/t) must be reduced.
To accelerate the development of new projects, the low-carbon manager called for pragmatism: “We must talk about what is good enough and accelerate progress over perfection,” he said, referring, among other things, to strict requirements for CO2 purity and high capture rates that increase costs significantly.
On the transport side, he proposed flexible solutions, such as direct injection from ships into reservoirs to avoid expensive terminals such as the Øygarden facility (Northern Lights).
In conclusion, Jagtøyen called for collaboration across the value chain and to find solutions that are “good enough.” He emphasised the need for new business models, strategic alliances and ideas for radical cost reductions.
He mentioned, among other things, CO2 utilisation, such as synthetic fuels and building materials, and Equinor’s investment in mineralisation technology to bind CO2 in stable carbonates in the subsurface.
