Norway invites bids for new CCS sites
Norway's government announced on September 1o it was inviting applications for developing two new carbon capture and storage (CCS) sites on its continental shelf, setting December 9 as the deadline.
One of the locations is in the North Sea, where Norway's Equinor, France's TotalEnergies and Shell are already developing the Northern Lights project. The other is in the Barents Sea, where Equinor and partners are considering blue ammonia production which would require offshore CCS facilities.
Norway already operates Europe's biggest CCS projects at the Sleipner and Snohvit fields, where CO2 extracted along with the natural gas is reinjected into reservoirs.
"Several players in the industry have approached the ministry with a desire to be allocated two specific areas they consider interesting for CO2 storage," Norway's petroleum ministry said in a statement.
In related news, the Northern Lights group announced on September 8 that they had decided to expand the project's scope beyond the 5mn metric tons/year of storage capacity currently envisaged, "due to increased interest from industrial customers across Europe."
"Interest in carbon capture and demand for storage capacity is growing fast as companies and countries start to implement net zero strategies," the project's developers said. "Northern Lights is adjusting its ambition to match market demand in Norway and Europe."
Northern Lights will have an initial storage capacity of only 1.5mn mt/yr, receiving CO2 from a cement plant and a waste-to-energy station in Norway. But its capacity is set to be expanded under a second stage, as it takes on additional customers in Norway and elsewhere in Europe.