Norway inaugurated Thursday the gateway to a massive undersea vault for carbon dioxide, a crucial step before opening what its operator calls the first commercial service offering CO2 transport and storage.

The Northern Lights project plans to take CO2 emissions captured at factory smokestacks in Europe and inject them into geological reservoirs under the seabed.

The aim is to prevent the emissions from being released into the atmosphere, and thereby help halt climate change.

On the island of Oygarden, a key milestone was marked on Thursday with the inauguration of a terminal built on the shores of the North Sea, its 12 shiny storage tanks rising up against the sky.

A jumble of pipes snake around the tanks, one of them plunging into the North Sea.

It is here that the liquified CO2 will be transported by boat.

From the tanks, it will travel through a 110-kilometre (68-mile) pipeline before being injected into the seabed, at a depth of around 2.6 kilometres, for permanent storage.

The facility, a joint venture grouping oil giants Equinor of Norway, Anglo-Dutch Shell and TotalEnergies of France, is expected to bury its first CO2 deliveries in 2025.

It will have an initial capacity of 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year, before being ramped up to five million tonnes in a second phase if there is enough demand.

"Northern Lights is really a demonstration project that carbon capture and storage is a technically feasible solution," managing director Tim Heijn told AFP.

It was one tool that could be used to combat climate change, he added.

- Prohibitive cost -

 

CCS technology is complex and costly but has been advocated by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), especially for reducing the CO2 footprint of industries like cement and steel, which are difficult to decarbonise.

The world's overall capture capacity is currently just 50.5 million tonnes, according to the IEA, or barely 0.1 percent of the world's annual total emissions.

In order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial era levels, CCS would have to prevent at least one billion tonnes of CO2 emissions per year by 2030, the IEA says.

The technology, still in its early stages, has been slow to develop because of prohibitive costs -- compared to what companies have to pay for CO2 emission quotas, for example.

It therefore depends heavily on subsidies.

"Public support was and will be crucial to help such innovative projects to advance, especially as CCS costs are still higher than the costs of CO2 emissions in Europe," said Daniela Peta, public affairs director at the Global CCS Institute.

The Norwegian government has financed 80 percent of the total cost of Northern Lights, a figure that has been kept confidential.

But Northern Lights is part of an ambitious 30-billion-kroner ($2.9 billion) scheme dubbed "Longship" -- after the Viking ships -- of which the state has provided 20 billion kroner.

The North Sea, with its depleted oil and gas fields and its vast network of pipelines, is an ideal place to bury unwanted greenhouse gases.

Several other undersea storage projects are under development in Europe.

The Greensand scheme, being built off Denmark's coast by British chemicals group Ineos and 23 partners, is due to be launched in late 2025 or early 2026.

- Greenwashing debate -

 

The Longship scheme initially included the creation of two CO2 capture sites in Norway.

The Heidelberg Materials cement factory in Brevik is expected to begin shipping its captured emissions to the site next year.

But snowballing costs have forced the waste-to-energy plant Hafslund Celsio in Oslo to review its plans.

Northern Lights has also secured its first commercial cross-border contracts.

It has signed with Norwegian fertiliser manufacturer Yara and energy group Orsted to bury CO2 from an ammonia plant in the Netherlands and two biomass power stations in Denmark.

But it is not easy to sign deals when the EU's emissions trading system (ETS) remains an affordable option.

"That means that you can emit and pay the ETS instead of trying to find a solution," laments Heijn.

"The next real game changer will be if we can implement this at scale. And to (do so)... we need to have sufficient emitters deciding with us that this is the way to go," he said.

But some environmentalists are unconvinced by the technology and have also raised concerns about the risk of leaks.

"Northern Lights is 'greenwashing'," said the head of Greenpeace Norway, Frode Pleym, noting that the project was run by oil companies.

"Their goal is to be able to continue pumping oil and gas. CCS, the electrification of platforms and all of these kinds of measures are used by the oil industry in a cynical way to avoid doing anything about their enormous emissions," he said.

Norway's Energy Minister Terje Aasland rejected those claims.

"The alternative is to fail to meet the climate challenges, or that industries will have to shut down", he told AFP. "This alternative is not at all desirable."