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At a high-level conference in Bergen last month, the oil-rich Nordic
nation announced that it would work with Britain to study how the base
of the North Sea could be used for carbon dioxide storage for European
countries. It will also allocate nearly $200 million toward carbon
capture and storage projects in the European Union. Although some
environmentalists aren''t yet convinced of the long-term prospects of
sequestering carbon dioxide emissions deep under the ocean, the idea
has become something of a holy grail in the effort to stop global
warming. The joint British-Norwegian study will build a profile for the
whole North Sea, assessing each country’s storage potential and
projections of likely volumes and locations of carbon dioxide (CO2)
flows. The North Sea Basin Task Force, which now includes Norway,
Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands, has previously estimated the
Utsira deep saline formation in the North Sea could store up to 600
billion ton of CO2, equivalent to all the emissions of all the power
stations in Europe for the next 600 years. Carbon capture is a prestige
issue for Norway. It was the first country to store CO2 from an
offshore oil platform underneath the seabed, the first to transport and
store CO2 subset from an onshore-liquefied natural gas plant, and hopes
to be the first to have full scale CO2 capture from a gas-fired power
plant. Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg has equated the importance of
carbon capture and storage technology for Norway to what the "moon
landing" was for the United States. Norwegian oil company Statoil
started storing carbon dioxide in the North Sea''s Utsira formation
underneath the Sleipner oil field platform 13 years ago. Since then,
the company has pumped 11 million tons of CO2 into the half-mile thick
layer of gas-tight rock. Statoil believes that the 430-mile-long
formation has the potential to hold three times as much. A major factor
leading to Statoil''s decision to begin storing CO2 from Sleipner under
the seabed was pure economics: It currently costs them around $30 per
ton of CO2 to put the emissions underground, roughly the same price as
Norway''s CO2 tax. Norway is the world''s third largest exporter of gas
and fifth largest oil exporter. Environmentalists have criticized the
country for putting more money into carbon capture so that it can
continue to pollute rather than investing in more renewable energy.
