Norway Covets Its Neighbors' Carbon Emissions

Here is a pretty amazing story from Bloomberg.  Here is a country, with very clean air, spending a billion dollars to capture carbon emitting from neighbors like Germany.  Beyond that they are looking to store carbon under the sea.  Both technologies give us a very big push towards cleaner air.

Wrapped into this is development of new technology, jobs and, you'll see, a means for capturing additional reserves from the sea in the process.

Let us know what you think.  We'll focus a radio story on the technology:

" The fjords of western Norway seem an unlikely place to tackle industrial pollution. But an hour’s drive north of Bergen, the Norwegians recently inaugurated the world’s largest test facility for carbon capture, the process of trapping carbon dioxide before it spews from the stacks of power plants and factories. The Norwegian government spent more than $1 billion to build the facility, a tangle of pipes, scaffolding, and cooling towers overlooking the port of Mongstad. Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg has called it “Norway’s moon landing.”

That’s quite an investment considering the country’s greenhouse emissions are among the lowest in the developed world. But it’s not domestic CO₂ the Norwegians are after. It’s their neighbors’. Beneath the North Sea lie vast reservoirs that have been emptied of oil by state-owned Statoil. “The potential to store [waste CO₂] in aquifers under the sea is enormous,” says Tore Amundsen, the managing director of the Technology Centre Mongstad.

In theory, Amundsen should face no shortage of customers from countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, where plans for underground storage of waste CO₂ have run into opposition from environmental groups. Norway’s oil industry could benefit, too, as the process of undersea injection would force residual oil and gas deposits out of the seabed.

While it’s integral to the fight against global warming, carbon capture has had a slow start. The International Energy Agency says it expects the technology to account for as much as 20 percent of the emissions reductions needed to limit global warming to a maximum of two degrees by 2050. The European Union has promised more than 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) in financing for carbon-capture projects, but with the region’s economy in crisis, national governments haven’t provided the loan guarantees required for the work to go forward..."

More tomorrow.