Norway Says to Form State CO2 Storage Company
Date: 05-Mar-07
Country: NORWAY
Author: John Acher
The plan for the state CO2 company is part of the government's proposal to parliament on cooperation in the carbon capture and storage (CCS) project planned for state-controlled oil and gas group Statoil's Mongstad refinery.
"This company will be responsible for the government's CCS projects, first of all Mongstad but also other projects where the Norwegian state is involved," Oil and Energy Minister Odd Roger Enoksen told Reuters.
For now, that also means involvement in a planned CCS project at a gas-fired power plant to be built at the Kaarstoe gas-processing plant north of Stavanger, he said.
"There will be a minor staff taking care of the state's interest in Mongstad phase 1 and also at Kaarstoe," Enoksen said. "This will not be a big company, at least not in the beginning."
The government aims to contribute to technological development and broad use of CO2 capture and storage technology, the Oil and Energy Ministry said in a statement.
CCS is a technology that is still under development and involves removing CO2 from the gas stream or emissions and burying them under ground or below the seabed. Statoil has been burying CO2 beneath the offshore Sleipner gas field since 1996.
FROM HYDRO TO GAS
Norway is planning to build gas-fired power generation units to diversify from its near total dependence on hydropower, but the government has said that new gas-fired plants should adopt CCS.
In October, the government and Statoil agreed to establish what they call the world's largest full-scale CO2 capture and storage project in connection with the planned construction of a combined heat and power plant at Mongstad.
The government will initially own 80 percent and Statoil 20 percent of that project. "Our intention is to bring in more industrial partners... and thereby decrease the state's ownership (of that project)," Enoksen said.
"We put a lot of attention on CCS and realise that in the beginning this will not be commercial, so public money has to put in in the early phase," he said.
The Mongstad CCS facility will capture CO2 emissions from the power plant, which will supply electricity to the refinery and to the grid beginning in 2010.
The plant will start with partial capture of CO2, but full-scale capture is expected to be in place by end-2014.
Up to now, Norway, which is one of the world's biggest crude oil exporters and Western Europe's biggest natural gas producer, has not used any of its gas for mainland power generation.
