Plans to inject carbon under the seabed are growing at an unprecedented rate. Norway’s Longship project aims to create large-scale offshore carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities, but critics claim that “despite the fanfare around CCS, it is a costly and risky endeavour”.
In CCS, CO2 emissions from various industries are captured, and stored indefinitely deep underground. Many industries, particularly oil and gas, claim that CCS is an effective tool in reducing atmospheric carbon emissions.
According to the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), a Washington-based non-profit, by mid-2023 more than 50 new offshore CCS projects had been announced globally.
In a report published towards the end of last year – Deep Trouble: The Risks of Offshore Carbon Capture and Storage – the CIEL says that instead of looking for ways to phase out their use of fossil fuels, polluting industries are instead focusing on CCS as a solution.
The report states that “despite the fanfare around CCS, it is a costly and risky endeavour”.
However, many countries claim that CCS offers a safe solution for carbon storage. Norway, which has a long history of carbon management, announced in 2020 that it was creating a full, large-scale CCS value chain project known as Longship in the North Sea, which the Norwegian government says could be a central storage camp for several industries across Europe.
In the $2.6bn Longship project, CO2 will be pumped along pipes to the Norwegian continental shelf, where it will be stored 2,600m below the seabed. According to the Norwegian government, storage capacity at the site will amount to 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year. However, Northern Lights – a joint venture between Norway’s Equinor, Britain’s Shell and France’s TotalEnergies – which is responsible for the transport and storage part of Longship, plans to increase storage capacity to five million tonnes a year through an additional development phase (phase 2).
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