With the world’s largest fleet of electric vehicles per capita, Norway may appear as a global leader in sustainability, but the country still remains one of the world’s biggest producers of oil and gas.
Seeking to ramp up its efforts in the fight against climate change, the Nordic country has recently devised plans to fund a large-scale project to capture and store carbon dioxide at sea.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has long been touted as a viable way to limit the effects of global climate change by reducing the amount of human-induced CO2 emissions in the atmosphere. But despite that being the case, few commercial projects exist today.
“Somebody has to start. So we are starting. And we are doing this because we want this technology to be developed so that more people, more countries, more companies can participate in it in the future,” Norway’s Prime Minister Erna Solberg told Euronews.
“Especially these industries that cannot just cut CO2 emissions by shifting to a different type of energy, because their CO2 emissions come from the industrial process, not their use of energy,” she said, citing the cement industry, which accounts for around 7 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.
The project — named Longship after the vessels built by the Vikings — will store CO2 captured from a cement plant in southern Norway and an incineration plant operating in Oslo. The greenhouse gas will be pumped down in a reservoir built undersea on the west coast of Norway specifically for this purpose.
