To combat climate change, Norway wants to be Europe’s carbon dump

The effort involves capturing carbon dioxide from industrial smokestacks and loading it onto ships, which will carry it here, to be buried in a layer of spongy rock a mile and a half beneath the seabed.

Storing CO2 this way isn’t new. A Norwegian oil and gas company has been doing it for nearly 30 years, separating carbon from the gas it extracts in the North Sea and sending it down a pipeline to a stretch of sandstone known as the Utsira Formation.

But not every enterprise sits above a layer of rock suitable for storing carbon. That’s why the introduction of ships could be pivotal: Transporting liquefied CO2 makes underground storage a far more widely accessible solution.

The world’s first carbon shipment arrived this summer, carrying 7,500 metric tons of liquefied CO2 from a Norwegian cement factory that otherwise would have gone into the atmosphere.

If all goes as planned, the project’s backers — Shell, Equinor and TotalEnergies, along with Norway — say their facility could pump 5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide underground each year, or about a tenth of Norway’s annual emissions.

The Northern Lights terminal, as it’s called, also could be a model for the world. Japan and South Korea — which have heavy industries and aggressive climate goals but don’t have the right geology to store CO2 — are negotiating deals to store their carbon pollution in nearby Indonesia and Malaysia, which have good underground storage reservoirs. Within the United States, the Energy Department has studied how liquid CO2 might be transferred between states on boats and barges.

The primary uncertainties for underground carbon storage are part technological, part financial.

For these projects to pay off, industrial carbon will have to stay locked in the Earth for thousands of years. If the CO2 slips out, it will keep warming the planet, and the underground storage efforts will have been expensive boondoggles.

The even bigger challenge may be persuading companies to pay for carbon storage, especially when many governments around the world are hesitating on their carbon reduction goals and slashing subsidies for green industries.

Norway remains aggressive in its emissions reduction targets. It is also Europe’s top oil and gas producer. That fossil fuel income helps give the government the flexibility to support an endeavor like a carbon dumping ground and see if it can make a difference.

The Heidelberg Materials cement factory in Brevik, Norway, has sat, hulking and gray, between rolling green hills and a deep, blue fjord for the past century.

Practically every Norwegian city is built from the cement that tumbles out of its kilns. As the plant crushes and heats limestone, the rock becomes cement in a chemical transformation that releases more than 100 tons of CO2 per hour. The cement industry as a whole is responsible for about 8 percent of human-generated carbon emissions.

Experiments are underway within the industry to make lower-carbon cement, and Heidelberg Materials is selling some of that. But at this plant, its big new effort aims to contain carbon before it’s emitted into the atmosphere.

The concept of carbon capture has its detractors. Greenpeace has called it an excuse for polluters to keep putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Supporters say it’s a promising way to cut emissions from hard-to-clean-up industries such as cement, steel and chemicals. United Nations assessments say some carbon capture is “unavoidable” if humanity wants to stave off climate disaster.

The cement plant project is heavily subsidized by the government of Norway, which is why the crown prince and energy minister were in attendance last month when Heidelberg Materials inaugurated its carbon-capture facility.

Now, when hot CO2-laden air comes rushing out of the cement kilns, the plant uses seawater from the neighboring fjord to cool it down. The cool air goes into a chamber where it gets sprayed with amine, a chemical that latches onto CO2 at low temperatures. The amine mist settles to the bottom, dragging carbon dioxide down with it. The rest of the air floats out of the smokestack with about 85 percent less CO2 in it, according to project manager Anders Pettersen.

Later, Heidelberg Materials uses waste heat from the kilns to break the chemical bonds, so that the amine releases the carbon dioxide. The pure CO2 then goes into a compressor that resembles a giant steel heart, where it gets denser and colder until it finally becomes liquid. That liquid CO2 remains in storage tanks until a ship comes to carry it away.

At best, operators expect this system to capture half the plant’s CO2 emissions: 400,000 metric tons per year, or the equivalent of about 93,000 cars on the road. That’s the most the plant can capture using just heat from the kilns. Going further would require burning fossil fuels or using an electric furnace, which would nearly double the plant’s energy use and “would be a very, very expensive endeavor,” Pettersen said.

The Brevik cement plant is the first to ship CO2 to the Northern Lights carbon storage site. But three other companies are lined up to follow: Ørsted, which will send CO2 from two bioenergy plants in Denmark; Yara, which will send carbon from a Dutch fertilizer factory; and Stockholm Exergi, which will capture carbon from a Swedish bioenergy plant that burns wood waste.

All of these projects have gotten significant subsidies from national governments and the European Union — essentially de-risking the experiment for the companies. Experts say the costs and headaches of installing and running carbon-capture equipment may start to make more financial sense as European carbon rules get stricter and the cost of emitting a ton of carbon dioxide goes up. Still, they say, it’s hard to imagine many companies deciding to invest in carbon capture without serious subsidies.

“What is the incentive for anyone to go invest a half a billion dollars doing a carbon-capture retrofit on a power plant?” said Sarah Saltzer, managing director of the Stanford Center for Carbon Storage. “Unless, for some reason, they’re just sort of altruistic, and want to do it for the good of the world — but are their shareholders going to want to do that? Let’s be real.”

The trip from the cement plant to the Northern Lights terminal takes about five days — with half a day at the jetty on either side to load and unload CO2.

The first shipments are being transported by Northern Pioneer, the world’s biggest carbon dioxide tanker ship, built specifically for this project.

The 430-foot ship can hold 7,500 metric tons of CO2 in tanks below deck. Those tanks keep it in a liquid state by cooling it to minus-15 degrees Fahrenheit and squeezing it with the same pressure the outside of a submarine would feel 500 feet below the waves. While that may sound extreme, consider that the liquid natural gas the ship uses for fuel has to be stored at minus-260 degrees.

“CO2 isn’t difficult to make it into a liquid,” said Sally Benson, professor of energy science and engineering at Stanford University.

Northern Pioneer is designed to emit about a third less carbon dioxide than a regular ship — key for a project that aims to eliminate carbon emissions. The ship burns natural gas, which emits less CO2 than marine diesel produces (though gas extraction is associated with methane leaks). The vessel uses a rotor sail to capture wind power. And it blows a constant stream of air bubbles to reduce friction as the hull cuts through the water, allowing it to burn less fuel.

For every 100 tons of CO2 that Northern Lights pumps underground, it expects to emit three tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, mainly by burning fuel for shipping.

Northern Pioneer has an identical sister ship, and six more are on order. The ships should allow transport of CO2 from any factory along the coast of the North Sea. But one day, if there are many companies committed to capturing and storing carbon, it might make sense to build a more conventional dedicated pipeline.

“If you’re going to do this at a large scale, say million tons or more, pipelines are a lot cheaper than ships,” said Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer with the MIT Energy Initiative.

At the jetty in Øygarden, liquid CO2 flows from the ships into a dozen temporary storage tanks that rise — gleaming, metallic and alien — 100 feet above the island’s stark granite landscape.

The liquefied carbon eventually flows out of the tanks and into a pipeline that plunges through the North Sea and into the rocky layers below it — an engineering feat that’s a bit like drilling for oil in reverse.

At the end of the pipeline, a mile and a half beneath the seabed, the CO2 will seep into a layer of spongy, porous sandstone. Right above is a 400-foot layer of dense shale rock. Engineers expect the still-liquid carbon dioxide will rise but stay trapped against the shale — hopefully for millennia. Over the centuries, it should chemically react with the rock, eventually being locked away in minerals.

Project organizers say they’re confident they can keep the CO2 trapped underground.

The North Sea is home to some of the best-studied carbon storage sites in the world. For more than two decades, scientists have been using earthquake detectors to monitor millions of tons of carbon stored here. Some has shifted in a direction operators didn’t expect — but so far, none of it has escaped to the surface.

Northern Lights plans to do real-time monitoring as well as periodic seismic scans over the next 25 years to see how the CO2 plume is spreading.

“We know a lot about the North Sea in terms of geologic storage, but … we need to make sure that we can follow the carbon, and we need to ensure the safety and reliability of these approaches so that accidents don’t happen,” said Jennifer Wilcox, professor of chemical engineering and energy policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

All of this is expensive, and so far governments have footed most of the bill. Norway covered 80 percent of the cost of the roughly $1 billion first phase of the Northern Lights project, with the rest coming from Shell, Equinor and TotalEnergies. Those oil and gas giants will put $714 million toward an ongoing expansion, which also will receive a $150-million E.U. subsidy.

“Norway has put billions of dollars in this project, and you’re just not going to see very many countries that have the ability to do that,” said Angela Anderson, director of industrial innovation and carbon removal at the World Resources Institute. Eventually, she said, if countries push private companies to pay for carbon capture through taxes or regulation, projects like Northern Lights could sustain themselves.

Heijn, the Northern Lights head, said he’s pinning his hopes on the idea that companies like Heidelberg Materials will be able to charge higher prices for low-carbon cement and other green products. But he admits that’s not guaranteed.

“The jury is out on how much more the market is willing to pay if you can fully decarbonize your products,” he said.

If some combination of regulations, taxes and premium green products does get the carbon-capture industry off the ground, ships sailing the coast of Norway might be replaced by permanent pipelines linking factories across Europe to carbon storage in the North Sea. But until then, Northern Lights is just trying to prove that it can reverse the flow of CO2.