Climate Adam discusses climate capture and storage. The video is over a year old and Adam refers to COP28 while COP29 was the most recent. Does he mention that there are huge fossil fuel subsidies from governments to the fossil fuel industry for CCS i.e. yet more profit on top of huge profits for destroying the climate and planet?
Thoughts of the Day 25 November 2024
I apologise that I repeat myself.
Storm Bert caused serious flooding in UK, particularly in the South Wales town of Pontypridd. Gross Capitalists scum and governments scum refuse to accept responsibility for their actions in destroying the climate at COP29. Yet more false solutions pushed by the fossil fuel industry pursued by governments …
It seems like nothing changes. Our climate is fekked. The fossil fuel industry and politicians are responsible for it since they have known since the 1960s. Governments and politicians are supposed to protect their populations. Instead they are controlled and quite willingly work for the rich and powerful. Despite the UK government committing to radical action to address climate, they still pursue false solutions i.e. carbon capture and nuclear power.
ed: We are at 1.5C increase now, the limit proposed by the Paris Agreement. We’re flying past it because gross Capitalists and Capitalist politicians are refusing to address the climate crisis. We are on course to far more and far more severe extreme weather events because of these cnuts.
Norwegian Oil Giant’s Plan to Capture UK’s Carbon Is Fraught With Risks
Original article by Edward Donnelly republished from DeSmog
The new Labour government is pledging billions to support projects based on climate-heating natural gas.
This story is the sixth part of a DeSmog series on carbon capture and was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe.
Norwegian state-owned oil and gas company Equinor, the North Sea’s largest fossil fuel producer, is positioning itself to play a key role in plans to turn Britain into a world leader in capturing carbon.
Earlier this month, the new Labour government pledged £21.7 billion over 25 years to finance carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects shortlisted by the previous Conservative administration. Equinor was among several companies awarded a total of £3.9 billion in subsidies from 2025 to 2026 under the scheme when Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves delivered the Autumn Budget on Wednesday.
But a DeSmog analysis of the company’s plans points to a series of technical, environmental and economic risks that raise questions over whether the projects will succeed in reducing emissions — or make them worse.
The uncertainties centre on Equinor’s backing for new “net zero” gas-fired power plants fitted with technology to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) billowing from their smokestacks, and bury the gas in disused oil and gas fields under the North Sea.
Carbon capture has never been deployed on gas-fired power stations at such a scale before — and a senior Equinor executive has made frank admissions around the technical challenges such projects face. Even if they perform as hoped, the power plants would likely burn imported liquified natural gas (LNG) from the United States, Qatar, and other suppliers — a fuel source that emits high levels of climate-heating methane when it’s being extracted, transported and stored.
Climate advocates are also concerned about Equinor’s plans to develop a UK market for “blue hydrogen”. This clean-burning fuel is made from natural gas, with carbon capture technology used to trap emissions released during the process. Even if the majority of these emissions are stored, however, the problem of methane leaking from the natural gas supply chain remains.
“This is not a decarbonisation project, it’s a ‘recarbonisation project’,” said environmental consultant Andrew Boswell, who launched a legal challenge to one of the new gas-power projects backed by Equinor and British oil giant BP in July.
Lobbying Push
With oil and gas companies intensifying their lobbying of government ministers over carbon capture in recent years, Equinor, which supplies about 27 percent of the UK’s natural gas, has secured a prime seat at the table. Equinor executives attended 16 meetings with UK ministers from 2020 to 2023 to discuss CCS — more than any other company, and second only to the Carbon Capture and Storage Association lobby group, which held 20 meetings, according to transparency records [See related story].
Concerned about the fossil fuel industry’s role in shaping the UK’s carbon capture strategy, a group of scientists and campaigners wrote to Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy and Net Zero, in September to urge him to reconsider the UK government’s support for the proposed gas-fired power and blue hydrogen projects.
“Putting the UK on the wrong pathway could be catastrophic,” wrote the authors, who included professors from 10 universities, including the University of Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Currently, this policy would lock the UK into using fossil fuel-based energy generation to well past 2050.”
Responding to the criticisms, Stuart Haszeldine, a geology professor at the University of Edinburgh and several other UK-based university professors, wrote their own letter to Miliband this month in support of CCS, and urged the government to disburse promised funding to avoid further delays.
“The fact remains that to achieve Net Zero in the UK by 2050 we need to deploy CCS at scale, and we need to deploy it well,” the authors wrote. “Not doing so could lead the UK to lose its status as a world leader in the space of tackling climate change, climate technology innovation, and a hub for investment for the energy transition.”
Technical Challenges
Equinor’s flagship carbon capture project in Britain is the estimated £1.5 billion Net Zero Teesside Power gas-fired power plant in the northeast of England, to be built in partnership with BP on the site of the demolished Teesside Steelworks.
Equinor and BP describe Net Zero Teesside Power as a “world-first gas-fired power station with carbon capture” and estimate that it will capture up to two million tonnes of CO2 per year by 2027, about 0.5 percent of the UK’s current yearly emissions.
Worldwide, attempts to make fossil fuel power plants cleaner through CCS have proved costly and challenging, however. So far, the approach has mostly only been used at power stations which burn coal — and even then the climate impact has been miniscule.
Only about 1.5 million tonnes of the world’s 37 billion tonnes of energy sector emissions each year, or 0.004 percent, were captured from power stations fitted with CCS in 2023, according to a DeSmog analysis of data from the Global CCS Institute, an industry group, and reporting from the SaskPower company in Canada.
And past attempts to build large gas-fired power stations with carbon capture in the UK, Norway, and Canada never made it past the planning stage.
That’s for both economic and technical reasons: It’s much harder and more expensive to capture the diffuse CO2 molecules emitted by burning natural gas than it is to mop up the denser CO2 concentrations spewed by natural gas processing facilities, the most common source of captured carbon worldwide.
‘Needle in a Haystack‘
Equinor encountered these challenges first-hand in 2006, when the company (then known as Statoil) began an estimated £650 million project to capture CO2 from its Mongstad gas-fired power station.
Then-prime minister of Norway Jens Stoltenberg called the project a “moon landing” for the climate, but project costs soon ballooned beyond earlier estimates, and the plan was abandoned in 2013. More recently, doubts about Equinor’s ability to capture CO2 from gas-fired power plants surfaced from within the company’s senior management.
Henrik Solgaard Andersen, then Equinor’s vice-president for low carbon technology, told Recharge News in 2021 that CCS at gas-fired power stations was “very difficult” and like “finding a needle in a haystack”.
Nevertheless, Equinor and BP told the UK government in their 2021 application for Net Zero Teesside Power that the companies could capture up to 95 percent of CO2 emissions at the gas-fired power plant. And the project’s website says the plant will capture “over 95% of emissions”.
That appeared to contradict Andersen’s 2021 comments to Recharge News, where he said a large gas-fired power station “will not be able to capture that amount of CO2” (90-plus percent).
“Nobody has run a dispatchable power plant with CCS before. Nobody knows really what the energy efficiency will be and the capture rate,” Andersen was quoted as saying.
When asked by DeSmog to clarify the apparent disparity between Andersen’s prior statements and company estimates for Net Zero Teesside Power, an Equinor spokesperson suggested referring all technical questions to BP, which will run operations at the power station.
“We believe that CCS could play a vital role in the UK’s transition to net zero by enabling industrial carbon capture, low-carbon hydrogen production, and power with carbon capture,” said the Equinor spokesperson.
BP did not respond to multiple requests for further information regarding CO2 capture estimates for Net Zero Teesside Power.
Equinor says its major investments in offshore wind and CCS will put the company on track to reach “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050 — and says it plans to store 30 to 50 million tonnes of CO2 a year by 2035 at various sites in Norway, the UK, Denmark and the United States, an over thirtyfold increase from the 0.8 million tonnes of CO2 it stored last year.
The company opened its new Northern Lights carbon transport and storage facility in Norway last month, a joint venture with Shell and TotalEnergies, but has yet to store large quantities of CO2 at the site.
‘Flawed’ Estimates
Even if Equinor and BP can achieve capture rates of 95 percent in Teesside, some researchers say that the project and others like it could still undermine Britain’s climate ambitions.
Lorenzo Sani, a power analyst from the London-based financial think tank Carbon Tracker, concluded in a June report that “flawed assumptions” and “underestimates” marred the government’s analysis of the Net Zero Teesside Power project’s potential emissions — which could make its climate impact up to four times higher than stated by BP and Equinor.
Sani argues that BP and Equinor have not taken adequate account of “upstream emissions” — methane and CO2 released during the production and transport of the natural gas burned in the power station.
As North Sea oil and gas production declines, the UK is increasingly importing gas in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG), with the majority from the United States. This gas generally has a higher emissions footprint than UK or Norwegian gas due to the elevated amounts of methane and CO2 released during extraction, and the process of turning the gas into a liquid, and shipping it.
In Teesside, U.S.-based company WaveCrest Energy plans to build a new liquified natural gas import terminal to satisfy future gas demand in the region, which it advertises as “sustainable” and “low carbon” — despite its significant carbon footprint.
“Liquefied natural gas comes with a much heavier carbon intensity when combustion emissions are removed, because in the whole supply chain, there are higher energy losses and leaks,” Sani said. “So the carbon intensity of the gas that is delivered is at five or more times higher than natural gas from the North Sea.”
That critique was the basis of the case brought by Boswell, the environmental consultant, who argued that planning permission for Equinor and BP’s Net Zero Teesside Power plant failed to consider the full climate impact of the project.
In her July ruling in favour of the government, High Court Justice Nathalie Lieven, however, found that “no logical flaw” was made by ministers in granting planning permission for the project. Boswell has appealed the ruling, with a hearing due in March.
In response to detailed questions about the government’s CCS strategy submitted by DeSmog, a spokesman for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said that the Climate Change Committee, an independent government advisory body, had described carbon capture as “a necessity not an option for reaching our climate goals.”
“Carbon capture, usage and storage will play a vital role in a decarbonised power system,” the spokesperson said.
WaveCrest Energy did not respond to a request for comment.
‘Business as Usual’
Beyond concerns over the emissions footprint of the planned projects, it is also unclear how Equinor and other oil companies venturing into the UK’s nascent carbon capture market can expect to make such projects pay.
Carbon capture advocates often cite Equinor’s success at capturing CO2 from its Sleipner offshore gas field in the North Sea since 1996 as proof the technology can work.
But critics point out that the project did nothing to reduce consumption of fossil fuels.
Ada Nissen, a University of Oslo historian, argues that the Sleipner project allowed Equinor to continue “business as usual” — earning the company a rebate on a new Norwegian carbon tax, but doing nothing to curb further natural gas extraction or consumption.
What’s more, company figures for the amount of CO2 stored at Sleipner have not always proved reliable.
Equinor has admitted over-reporting the amount of CO2 captured at Sleipner during the period 2017-2021 due to an equipment malfunction, DeSmog reported this week, expanding on findings by Norwegian public broadcaster NRK Rogaland in 2022.
Elsewhere, in the 52 years since carbon capture was first deployed in a Texas oilfield, the fossil fuel industry has mostly used the technique to revive depleting oilfields by pumping CO2 back underground to force hard-to-reach oil to the surface. Selling that oil helped make the expensive business of capturing carbon economically viable — and generated more emissions when the oil was burned.
DeSmog revealed in March that the North Sea oil industry has long studied the possibility of using the technique — known as enhanced oil recovery — to reanimate declining offshore fields. Nevertheless, oil companies such as Shell and Equinor say they have no plans to do so.
That raises the question of how industry will finance the UK’s carbon capture plans.
The previous Conservative government set a target to capture 20 to 30 million tonnes of CO2 by 2030 — from none today. Such a build-out would mean constructing the equivalent of roughly half of the world’s total CCS capacity of about 50 million tonnes, which took half a century to develop, over the next five years. The new Labour government has not explicitly endorsed that target, though its carbon capture strategy is broadly in line with its predecessor’s.
In Britain, two decades of on-off attempts to introduce CCS have foundered due to the lack of a viable market to sell captured CO2, and wavering policy support.
“There’s been no monetary value placed on putting carbon back into the ground, and that’s why it doesn’t happen,” said Haszeldine, the geology professor at the University of Edinburgh.
Under the UK’s emissions trading scheme (ETS), companies must buy CO2 pollution allowances. In theory, rising prices for these permits could incentivise companies to capture carbon — instead of venting it into the atmosphere. Permits are trading at less than £40 per tonne, however, far below the estimated costs for capturing CO2 from a variety of sources. For example, the U.S.-based National Petroleum Council estimated in 2021 that it would cost an average of £90 per tonne to capture CO2 from a large gas-fired power plant.
In the absence of a reliable market signal, industry is clear that it will need significant subsidies.
Funding Concerns
The UK’s Carbon Capture Storage Association lobby group — which counts Equinor as a member — estimates that £2-3 billion in subsidies will be needed a year by 2028 to get a British CCS industry off the ground. That’s roughly in line with the government’s £3.9 billion in CCS subsidies for 2025-2026 announced on Wednesday, but higher than Labour’s pledge of £21.7 billion over 25 years — an average of less than £1 billion annually.
Despite past funding pledges, successive governments have come nowhere near to disbursing such funds. Since 2020, the government has granted £171 million for CCS and hydrogen projects as part of its 2021 UK Research and Innovation funding scheme. Equinor was the second largest recipient, with project grants amounting to more than £22 million, behind Italian oil company Eni with £30 million, according to a DeSmog review of the government’s subsidy database.
Companies are open about their worries over shortfalls.
In June last year, representatives of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association told Grant Shapps, then Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, that its members were concerned about delays and there was a “struggle to keep investors upbeat”, according to meeting notes obtained by DeSmog via a freedom of information request.
In a presentation given at a London CCS conference in October last year, Catherine Raw — then vice-president for Scottish utility SSE — stated that plans to scale up the UK’s gas-fired power CCS were beset by “lack of pace” which made them “unachievable.” If nothing happened soon, the then government’s plan to decarbonise electricity generation by 2035 — a target which Labour has since brought forward to 2030 — would force SSE to shut down much of its business. SSE did not respond to a request for comment.
To meet the net zero challenge, SSE is partnering with Equinor to build two gas-fired power plants with CCS priced at £2.2 billion each, in Peterhead, Scotland and Keadby in the east of England. Neither project has yet been selected for government funding, with priority given to Net Zero Teesside Power.
The Peterhead project has sparked opposition from climate groups including Friends of the Earth Scotland, which organised a protest in Edinburgh last month. “Projects like Peterhead carbon capture and Net Zero Teesside are wasting both time and money that should be spent on climate solutions that work from day one and will improve lives,” said Alex Lee, a campaigner for the group, responding to the CCS subsidy announcement in the Budget. “These greedy energy companies will do whatever it takes to keep the subsidies flowing, leaving the UK public to pick up the tab for its inevitable failure.”
In addition to Equinor and SSE, German energy company RWE plans to build CCS retrofits at three gas-fired power plants it operates in Pembroke, Wales, and Great Yarmouth and Staythorpe in eastern England, as well as a new-built gas power station with CCS at Stallingborough, also in eastern England. RWE estimates the projects could capture up to 11 million tonnes of CO2 emissions a year.
In February, Uniper — the German-state owned power utility and gas company — also announced plans to retrofit its Connah’s Quay gas-fired power station in Wales with CCS.
“Efficient gas-fired power stations fitted with carbon capture will support the transition to renewables by providing a firm and flexible power source, crucial for filling the gap when there is insufficient wind or solar energy to meet demand,” RWE said in a statement.
Uniper did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, other carbon capture projects remain stalled. In June, Equinor delayed the potential start-date for a planned blue hydrogen plant near Hull on the east coast of England until 2027 at the earliest, citing funding concerns.
In September, Equinor cancelled plans to export blue hydrogen from Norway to Germany, citing lack of demand and economic challenges. And this month, ExxonMobil dropped plans to build a CO2 pipeline from its Fawley Refinery in southern England, linked to a proposed blue hydrogen plant at the site.
Budget Announcement
While the government’s carbon capture funding shortlist initially included eight projects, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said this month that the list would be cut to three.
The recipients are Net Zero Teesside Power; a blue hydrogen plant to be operated by EET Technologies — a subsidiary of Indian conglomerate and oil company Essar; and the Protos waste-to-energy power station with CCS, planned by waste and energy companies Biffa and Encyclis in Merseyside.
Left out of the funding round from the government’s initial shortlist were two blue hydrogen facilities planned in Teesside; a lime plant; a separate waste-to-power facility in Merseyside; and a project to capture CO2 at the Padeswood cement works in northern Wales.
In addition to the three selected carbon capture projects, the government plans to support Italian oil and gas company Eni’s CO2 transport and storage project in the Irish Sea as part of the HyNet Cluster in Merseyside, as well as the Northern Endurance Partnership CO2 transport and storage project in the North Sea, to be operated by Equinor, BP and TotalEnergies.
Eni says that its HyNet CO2 transport and storage network on land and in the Irish Sea could handle up to 4.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year, with plans to scale capacity to 10 million tonnes after 2030.
“The project will help preserve local jobs by supporting the decarbonisation of hard-to-abate industries, as well as attracting investment and creating new jobs,” said an Eni spokesperson.
David Parkin, chair of the HyNet Alliance, which includes Eni and EET Technologies, said that all blue hydrogen produced by EET Technologies will meet the UK’s “Low Carbon Hydrogen Standard” and estimates that more than 97 percent of CO2 will be captured from its blue hydrogen production plant.
“The low-carbon hydrogen can be stored in significant quantities to support the UK’s energy security and provide a reliable source of power for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine,” Parkin said.
The government’s decision to prioritise natural gas-based CCS projects such as new gas-fired power plants and blue hydrogen has alarmed some climate advocates, who recommend that the technology be used to clean up existing dirty industries, not build more fossil-based infrastructure.
Any investments in carbon capture “should be focusing on genuine ‘hard-to-abate’ applications like cement, fertiliser, and other chemicals processing/refining — not power generation and blue hydrogen,” said Arjun Flora, European director of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank, which analysed the UK’s carbon capture strategy last year.
“The most likely consequence is a waste of public money, at a time when budgets are constrained,” he added.
Record Profits
While Equinor, BP and other companies waited for subsidies from the UK government to develop carbon capture in recent years, skyrocketing energy prices earned them record profits from oil and gas. In 2022, Equinor recorded adjusted earnings of £61 billion, more than double its previous annual record.
With demand for Norwegian oil and gas remaining strong, Equinor’s chief executive Anders Opedal announced plans in August to invest between £4.3 and £5 billion a year to maintain production levels in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea until 2035.
The company and partner Ithaca Energy also plan to invest an initial £3.1 billion to drill the Rosebank oil field west of the Shetland Islands, the UK’s largest fossil fuel project in a decade.
Last year, DeSmog revealed that former Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt had reassured Equinor’s Opedal of the government’s support for the Rosebank project during a meeting in January 2023, and had appeared to suggest that low carbon investments could improve the company’s image.
Even if Equinor succeeds in transforming the North Sea into a vast CO2 capture and storage site, however, the company’s target to store 30 to 50 million tonnes of CO2 a year by 2035 would nowhere near offset the 262 million tonnes of CO2 emitted from its operations and burning its oil and gas last year, according to company data reviewed by DeSmog.
That’s more than 300 times the combined total of 0.8 million tonnes of CO2 emissions it captured and stored in 2023 at its carbon capture project at the Sleipner gas field, and a similar facility in the Barents Sea.
Carbon capture expert Stuart Haszeldine said that fossil fuel companies should be bound by a “carbon takeback obligation” — a legal mechanism aimed at forcing them to store an equivalent amount of CO2 to the quantity produced by burning their products.
By subsidising carbon capture without constraining fresh drilling, governments are allowing fossil fuel companies to “have their cake and eat it too,” he said.
Additional reporting by TJ Jordan and Michael Buchsbaum
Original article by Edward Donnelly republished from DeSmog
Norway’s Equinor Admits It “Over-Reported” Amount of Carbon Captured At Flagship Project for Years
Original article by Edward Donnelly republished from DeSmog.
DeSmog review of company data shows North Sea’s leading oil and gas producer downgraded estimates for CO2 stored at Sleipner gas field by almost a third.
This story is the fifth part of a DeSmog series on carbon capture and was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe.
Norwegian oil and gas company Equinor has admitted over-reporting the performance of a flagship carbon capture and storage project by about 30 percent due to defective monitoring equipment, underscoring risks associated with plans to scale the technology as a climate solution, DeSmog can reveal.
In a footnote in its latest sustainability data, Equinor said a malfunction in equipment used to measure the amount of gas flowing through a pipeline at its Sleipner gas field in the North Sea had caused it to over-report the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) stored from 2017 to 2021.
“Due to a flawed flow transmitter at Equinor’s CO2 injection facilities at Sleipner, the figures for CO2 injected were over-reported in the period 2017-2021,” the footnote said. “The transmitter was replaced in March 2021, and the figures have been updated accordingly.”
Equinor did not quantify the extent of the over-estimates in the footnote on Sleipner. The 28-year-old project is often cited by carbon capture advocates as proof that it’s technically feasible to trap and store large quantities of CO2 underground.
A DeSmog review of publicly available company data suggests that Equinor captured and stored a cumulative total of 1.6 million tonnes of CO2 at Sleipner from 2017-2019, compared to its initial estimate of 2.1 million tonnes — implying that it had previously over-reported the amount of gas stored during that three-year period by about 30 percent. [See note on methodology at the end of this story].
A lack of comparable data made it harder to estimate how much the company may have over-estimated CO2 capture at Sleipner in 2020 and early 2021, although partial numbers suggested that the figure was also about 30 percent.
Equinor declined to say when the broken equipment at Sleipner was first detected, or how the company arrived at its revised estimates for CO2 capture. A spokesperson referred DeSmog to the company’s website and sustainability reports for further information on its carbon capture projects.
Equinor says on its website that it captures 1.0 million tonnes of CO2 at Sleipner each year, and a further 0.7 million tonnes from a similar project at the Snøhvit gas field in the Barents Sea. Figures in the company’s sustainability reports, however, suggest that it is routinely failing to achieve this level of capture.
In 2021, with the Snøhvit facility shut down due to a fire at the associated Hammerfest LNG (liquified natural gas) plant, Equinor captured and stored a total of 0.3 million tonnes of CO2, all at Sleipner, according to its annual sustainability report — less than 20 percent of the total advertised on its website.
Last year, with both CCS sites operational, Equinor captured and stored a total of 0.8 million tonnes of CO2, according to the company’s online sustainability data — about half the advertised total.
The drop in CO2 capture and storage could be linked to waning natural gas production at Sleipner, said Grant Hauber, a researcher for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis think tank, who wrote a 2023 report on Norway’s carbon capture projects.
“As production from the Sleipner field declines, the quantity of CO2 being handled declines,” Hauber said. “Equinor has not disclosed if there is a practical minimum where the processing facilities are no longer effective in handling CO2.”
Separately, Hauber’s 2023 report showed that Sleipner and Snøhvit encountered unforeseen issues with CO2 storage, with Equinor having to drill a new CO2 injection well at Snøhvit between 2010-2016, and unpredictable underground CO2 migrations at Sleipner. The company says that its CO2 storage is now fully operational.
The downward revision of capture estimates at Sleipner and Equinor’s frequent failure to run its two carbon capture projects at full capacity echo a long history of missed targets, cost-overruns and economic problems at CCS projects in North America and Australia. These challenges have convinced many environmental groups that fossil fuel companies primarily see the technology as a cover for continued expansion of oil and gas production, rather than a viable tool for curbing emissions on a global scale.
Nevertheless, Equinor has leveraged its experience at Sleipner and Snøhvit to position itself as a key player in the UK’s plans to ramp up carbon capture capacity with the support of £22 billion of subsidies announced by the new Labour government this month.
The Norwegian company is also partnering with France’s TotalEnergies and the UK’s Shell on the Northern Lights carbon storage project in the North Sea — a key component of the European Union’s target to boost carbon capture to meet its climate goals.
Equinor says that it aims to increase its CO2 storage capacity to 30 to 50 million tonnes by 2035 from projects planned in Norway, the UK, Denmark and the United States. That would require a massive build-out: Today, the world’s combined CCS capacity amounts to about 50 million tonnes of CO2 a year.
Although the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) sees a significant roll-out of carbon capture to meet net zero targets, it has also warned of the dangers of over-reliance on the technology.
“The [fossil fuel] industry needs to commit to genuinely helping the world meet its energy needs and climate goals — which means letting go of the illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution,” wrote Fatih Birol, IEA executive director, in the introduction to a report on clean energy transitions for oil companies published in November.
Oslo-based think tank Bellona, which also sees a role for carbon capture, emphasised the importance of companies providing reliable capture data.
“Bellona believes that reliable monitoring, reporting and verification is important. It is clear we need CCS, and we need to be able to trust that the system works as it should,” said Olav Øye, the organisation’s senior advisor for industry and climate.
Venting CO2 into the Atmosphere
Equinor (then known as Statoil) began capturing carbon in 1996 at the CO2-rich Sleipner field in the North Sea as a way to reduce its exposure to a new Norwegian tax on CO2 emissions.
The company promotes its carbon capture operations as a key part of its clean energy strategy, with CCS featuring in its advertising campaigns. Nevertheless, Equinor’s records indicate that its Sleipner facility did not capture and store the majority of the field’s CO2 emissions in recent years, but rather vented them into the atmosphere.
Emissions from operations at the Sleipner field amounted to about 0.7 million tonnes of CO2 in 2023. That same year, in 2023, Equinor captured and stored a combined total of about 0.8 million tonnes of CO2 at Sleipner and Snøhvit, implying that the Sleipner field released more CO2 than was stored.
In 2021, the year that Sleipner stored a reported 0.3 million tonnes of CO2, about 0.8 million tonnes of CO2 were vented into the atmosphere from operations at the site, more than double the amount captured, the data showed.
Sleipner was also one of the dirtiest offshore projects in Norway last year, when measured in terms of “CO2 intensity” – the amount of carbon dioxide released from oil and gas production per unit of energy.
Equinor lists the combined CO2 intensity of Sleipner and the nearby Gudrun gas field at 19.1 kilograms of CO2 per barrel of oil equivalent, which was the third highest among 19 listed oil and gas production sites operated by Equinor in Norway.
According to Equinor’s 2023 reporting, Sleipner emitted 658,000 tonnes of CO2, 41 times higher than Gudrun’s 16,000 tonnes — despite only producing about a third more natural gas — meaning the Sleipner field’s individual CO2 intensity would be much higher if reported individually.
The Snøhvit gas field has also proved highly CO2-intensive, even when its carbon capture facility has operated at maximum capacity, due to the energy needed to liquefy natural gas for export at the associated Hammerfest LNG facility on Melkøya Island.
Equinor reported 0.9 million tonnes of CO2 emissions from its Hammerfest LNG facility last year, making it the company’s third most polluting project overall, behind its Mongstad oil refinery and Oseberg gas field.
In August 2023, the Norwegian government approved the “Snøhvit Future” project, which includes plans to electrify operations at the LNG export plant with an approximate $1.2 billion investment announced from Equinor and project partners Petoro, TotalEnergies, Neptune Energy and Wintershall Dea.
The developers say that the new infrastructure will reduce emissions by an estimated 850,000 tonnes of CO2 per year by 2030.
While additional CCS infrastructure was considered to reduce emissions at the LNG export plant, Trond Bokn, head of project development for Equinor, wrote in an article in the company’s online magazine that expanding carbon capture at Snøhvit to meet that target would have cost at least $3.4 billion — about three times the electrification plans.
While Equinor says that carbon capture would be too costly for the LNG export facility at Snøhvit, the company aims to apply the approach in other sectors in Norway and abroad, where government subsidies are available.
In September, Equinor inaugurated the Northern Lights offshore carbon transport and storage project near Bergen, its joint venture with TotalEnergies and Shell, which it says will store 1.5 million tonnes of industrial CO2 emissions a year from a cement works and waste-to-energy plant on the Norwegian mainland.
The majority of the project is financed by $1.19 billion in funding from the Norwegian government and an additional $141 million grant from the European Union’s Connecting Europe Facility fund.
Even if Equinor reaches its 2035 goal of storing 50 million tonnes of CO2 a year — a more than 50 times increase over the CO2 the company captured and stored in 2023 — it would only offset about a fifth of the 262 million tonnes of CO2 emitted from its operations and burning its oil and gas last year, according to company data reviewed by DeSmog.
Methodology and Sources
Equinor initially reported that it had captured and stored a cumulative total of 4.2 million tonnes of CO2 over 2017-2019 according to a tally of yearly data from the company’s online sustainability data (see initial report: “Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Captured and Stored”; see current report for comparison).
The company does not break down the amount of CO2 captured and stored from its two active CCS facilities at the Sleipner and Snøhvit gas fields in its sustainability data, but DeSmog was able to estimate the amount using a separate Equinor document related to the Snøhvit project. (see: “Informasjon til allmennheten om risiko og beredskap: Hammerfest LNG”, page 4).
A chart in this document (“CO2 Lagring” or “CO2 Storage”) indicates that Snøhvit was operating at a capacity of about 0.7 million tonnes of CO2 a year over the period 2017-2019, which equates to a cumulative total of 2.1 million tonnes of CO2 stored. Subtracting that figure from the total of 4.2 million tonnes of CO2 that Equinor reported storing during the period gives the remainder stored at Sleipner, also 2.1 million tonnes.
Equinor later revised its estimate for the cumulative total of CO2 stored over the period 2017-2019 for both sites down to 3.7 million tonnes, with all changes attributed to the flawed flow transmitter at Sleipner. That implies that Snøhvit would have still captured a total of 2.1 million tonnes of CO2 during this period, but Sleipner would have only captured a revised 1.6 million tonnes.
The difference between the 2.1 million tonnes of stored CO2 initially attributed to Sleipner and the revised figure of 1.6 million tonnes suggest that Equinor initially over-reported CO2 storage by about 31 percent during the period 2017-2019. Given that the company provided figures rounded to the hundred thousand, it was impossible to arrive at a more precise percentage.
DeSmog was not able to obtain specific CO2 capture and storage totals for Sleipner or Snøhvit in 2020, when Equinor initially reported 1.1 million tonnes of total CO2 stored, before revising that figure to 0.9 million tonnes. However, the total amount of over-estimation attributable to Sleipner — 0.2 million tonnes of CO2 — suggests a similar percentage of over-reporting as the period 2017-2019.
Equinor’s sustainability dataset also indicated over-reporting for Sleipner in early 2021, but DeSmog was unable to find comparable data to calculate the size of the overestimate. The company appears to have revised the totals sometime in 2022, based on a comparison of its yearly sustainability reports.
Equinor’s webpage “CCS: Carbon capture and storage — making net zero possible” says that the company captures and stores about 1 million tonnes of CO2 a year at Sleipner and its webpage “Snøhvit” indicates that the company captures and stores about 0.7 million tonnes of CO2 a year at the field.
Equinor’s yearly emissions total of 262 million tonnes of CO2 was calculated by adding up the company’s Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 emissions reported in its 2023 sustainability data.
DeSmog shared its calculations with Equinor. The company did not respond.
Original article by Edward Donnelly republished from DeSmog.