World

Oslo —The first commercial service of the world that offers carbon storage on the Coast of Norway has carried out its inaugural Injection of CO2 in the North Sea Fund of the North Sea, the Consortium of Lights of the North that operates the site said on Monday.

The Northern Lights project, led by Equinor, Shell and Totalgies oil giants, implies transporting and burying the CO2 captured in smoostacks throughout Europe. The objective is to prevent emissions from being released in the atmosphere and, therefore, helping to stop climate change.

“Now we inject and store the first CO2 safely in the reservoir,” said Northern Lights managing director Tim Heijn, in a statement. “Our ships, facilities and wells are now in operation.”

In concrete terms, after CO2 is captured, liquefy and transported by Bergen’s terminal on the western coast of Norway.

Then it is transferred to large tanks before being injected through a 68 -mile pipe towards the bottom of the sea, at a depth of around 1.6 miles, for permanent storage.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) Technology has been listed as a climate tool by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), especially to reduce the CO2 footprint of industries such as cement and steel that are difficult to decarbonize.

The first CO2 injection in the Lightts Northern geological reservoir was from the Heidelberg material cement plant in Germany in Brevik in southeastern Norway.

But CCS technology is complex, controversial and expensive.

Without financial assistance, it is currently more profitable for industries to buy “pollution permits” in the European carbon market than to pay for capturing, transporting and storing its CO2.

Until now, Northern Lights has signed only three commercial contracts in Europe. One is with a Yara ammonia plant in the Netherlands, another with two of Orsted’s biofuel plants in Denmark, and the third with an exergi stochamus thermal plant in Sweden.

Financed to a large extent by the Norwegian state, Northern Lights has an annual CO2 storage capacity of 1.7 million tons, which is expected to increase to 5.5 million tons for the end of the decade.

While efforts such as Northern Lights focus on capturing carbon directly from the most highly polluting sources (industrial smoke batteries, efforts have also been launched to capture the gas from ambient air, an even more controversial methodology.

Mark Jacobson, a professor of Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, told News themezone earlier this year that he had doubts about the motivations and the effectiveness of both types of carbon capture, and said bluntly that “the capture of direct air is not a real solution. We do not have time to waste with this useless technology.”

Jacobson believes that the capture of direct air, in particular, is a Boondoggy, and more effort must be focused on changing to clean energy sources.

Currently, the United States obtains approximately 60% of its electricity from fossil fuels.

“You have to think who proposes this technology,” Jacobson said. “Who will benefit from carbon capture and direct air capture? They are fossil fuel companies.”

“They only say: ‘Well, we are extracting both CO2 and we are broadcasting. Therefore, we should allow us to continue contaminating, continue mine,” Jacobson told News themezone, adding that his position has not made it popular among many in the energy sector.

“Oh, yes, diesel people hate me, the people of gasoline hate me, the people of ethanol hate me, nuclear people hate me, coal people hate me. They do it, because I tell the truth,” he said. “We don’t need any of these technologies.”

• Air pollution
• Climate change
• Carbon monoxide
• Norway
• Carbon capture
• Coal
• Global warming
• Oil and gas
• Ozone