OSLO (Reuters) – Norway is offering two new offshore areas for companies interested in developing carbon dioxide storage, the oil and energy ministry said on Friday.
One of the areas is east of the Troll gas field in the North Sea and the other is northeast of the Goliat oilfield in the Barents Sea, maps published by the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate showed.
The ministry has set a Dec. 9 deadline to submit applications for developing offshore CO2 storage in the areas offered, and said it had already received some preliminary interest.
A joint venture formed by Norway’s oil and gas firm Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies is already developing an offshore storage called Northern Lights southwest of Troll.
The site is expected to be able to store up to 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 starting from 2024, with capacity to be expanded to 5 million tonnes at a later stage.
The International Energy Agency sees the CCS as a vital technology to decarbonize industries which have a few options of replacing fossil fuels, as well as producing emissions-free hydrogen from natural gas.
(Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis; Editing by Edmund Blair)
