Three of the world’s biggest oil companies called on Norway to help maintain funding for carbon capture and storage technology that is stagnating amid concerns about whether it can ever be cost-effective.
The chief executive officers of Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Total SA and Norway’s state-controlled Statoil ASA gathered on the sidelines of an energy conference in Oslo to make the case for a flagship Norwegian project, in which the companies plan to store CO2 emissions under the North Sea after they’ve been shipped and piped from onshore industrial plants.
Their remarks are aimed at the Norwegian parliament, which is due to decide in the coming months on whether to take the project forward. At stake is whether taxpayers will help support investments of as much as 12.6 billion kroner ($1.6 billion) in addition to annual running costs of as much as 890 million kroner. With costs plunging rapidly for rival green technologies such as wind and solar power, the price-tag on CCS along with the complications of making projects work is raising question marks over whether it can ever be viable worldwide.
“It’s stagnating, and we need to speed this up,” Statoil CEO Eldar Saetre said in an interview with his counterparts Ben van Beurden from Shell and Total’s Patrick Pouyanne. “The Norwegian project is, on that background, extremely important.”
Norway’s support for CCS would help boost the case for the oil companies to back the project. A final investment decision won’t be made until 2019.
Worldwide, CCS is struggling to advance even though the International Energy Agency says it’s one of the key ways the world will roll back greenhouse-gas emissions in future decades. The technology siphons off carbon dioxide from factory and power plant smokestacks then injects it into underground rock formations, holding the gas there forever to prevent it from warming the Earth’s atmosphere.
While CCS has been shown to work in dozens of demonstrator projects, only 17 large-scale plants are now operating worldwide. Of those, in all except four the gas is used to boost oil production in aging fields, according to the Global CCS Institute, an industry group promoting the technology. Only one project has been green-lighted since 2014.