Norwegian energy company Equinor has been awarded licenses for two underground carbon dioxide storage sites on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS), described as “important building blocks” in Norway’s CO2 transport and storage infrastructure (CCS) ambitions.
Børre Jacobsen, Managing Director of the Northern Lights project. Credit: Northern Lights website
Norwegian energy company Equinor has been awarded licenses for two underground carbon dioxide storage sites on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS), described as “important building blocks” in Norway’s CO2 transport and storage infrastructure (CCS) ambitions.
Norway’s Ministry of Petroleum and Energy announced the award of licenses on Tuesday with Equinor as the operator. Known as Smeaheia in the North Sea and Polaris in the Barents Sea, the two sites will serve as the storage sites for carbon dioxide captured from industrial customers.
In its application, Equinor submitted plans for 20 million tonnes of annual carbon dioxide storage capacity at the Smeaheia site, representing a sharp increase in the capacity to store carbon dioxide on a commercial basis on the Norwegian. Northern Lights, the carbon dioxide storage facility in the Longship project, has a planned injection capacity of 1.5 million tonnes a year in Phase 1, available from 2024, with plans to develop the capacity to 5-6 million tonnes a year from around 2026.
Located in the Barents Sea about 100 km from the coast of Finnmark, the Polaris site will receive approximately two million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year during stage one. The storage is a key part of the Barents Blue project which Equinor is developing in collaboration with Vår Energi and Horisont Energi. The project is developing an ammonia production facility at Markoppneset in Hammerfest that will reform natural gas from the Barents Sea to clean, blue ammonia using carbon capture and storage.
Through the two projects, Equinor aims to contribute to carbon emission reductions equivalent to half of Norway’s annual emissions, with plans to develop further storage licenses in the North Sea in the coming years as well as the construction of common, pipeline-based infrastructure.
Irene Rummelhoff, Executive VP for Marketing, Midstream and Processing (MMP) at Equinor said: “We see that demand for CO2 storage is increasing in several countries, and we want to get started with developing new CO2 storages quickly, so that we can offer industrial solutions that can contribute to decarbonisation in Europe.”
Equinor has an ambition to develop value chains for CO2 transport and storage with an annual capacity of 15-30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2035.