The Northern Lights Alliance of Equinor (operator), Shell and Total, has submitted a plan to transport and store CO 2 on the Norwegian shelf.
The Northern Lights Alliance of Equinor (operator), Shell and Total, has submitted a plan to transport and store CO2 on the Norwegian shelf.
Northern Lights is part of the first Norwegian full-scale project for transport and storage of CO2 – Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). The project includes capturing CO2 from two industrial companies in eastern Norway and transporting liquid CO2 to a terminal in western Norway.
CO2 will be captured from Fortum’s heat recovery plant at Klementsrud in Oslo and Norcem’s cement factory in Breivik in the municipality of Porsgrunn, and then transported by ship to an intermediate storage location at Kollsnes in the Øygarden municipality.
From there, the liquid CO2 will be transported along 100-km long pipeline on the seabed and pumped into a reservoir at a depth of around 2700 m in the North Sea for permanent storage. The reservoir is in the Johansen Formation southwest of the Troll field.
The plan for the first phase is to inject 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 into the Johansen Formation. However, the plan includes flexibility to accommodate expanding the location’s capacity, and one important objective is to be able to offer the site as a storage location for CO2 from other European countries.
In January 2019, Northern Lights was awarded the first exploitation licence for injection and storage of CO2. The awarded area is located near the Troll field in the North Sea.
Last December drilling started on an exploration well to identify suitable reservoirs for CO2 storage. The exploration well was terminated in February.
‘The well proved sandstone with properties well-suited for a CO2 storage location,’ said assistant director for exploration in the NPD, Wenche Tjelta Johansen.
The reservoir is filled with water, and there has never been any oil or gas production from this part of the formation.
Northern Lights will be the latest of several CCS projects in Norway. CO2 has been removed from the Sleipner Vest gas and injected in the Utsira Formation since 1996. Around one million tonnes of CO2 are stored in the subsurface every year. Since 2007, around 700,000 tonnes of CO2 have also been stored each year on the Snøhvit field.
It is separated from the gas at the process plant at Melkøya before it is routed by pipeline down into a reservoir about 140 km from land. Regular surveys are performed to monitor how injected CO2 moves within the storage location.
The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate has produced a CO2 storage atlas for the Norwegian shelf, mapping areas that are suitable for safe and secure long-term storage.
Estimates indicate that the reservoir volume on the shelf is sufficient to accommodate more than 80 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, a volume equivalent to 1000 years of current Norwegian CO2 emissions
