Norway has given a cautious approval to Europe’s largest carbon-capture project

Among all European countries, Norway is the only one making any serious progress on a technology crucial to helping the world reach its climate goals: carbon capture and storage.

The concept is simple. Ideally we stop burning fossil fuels and otherwise emitting carbon dioxide immediately. But in many cases that’s not possible. For those situations, we now have the technology to capture the CO2 emissions and bury them underground, to act as a bridge to a time when we can be fossil-fuel free. Norway built the first large scale carbon-capture project at the Sleipner gas field in 1996, and since has been storing nearly 1 million metric tons of CO2 each year.

Now, Norway appears ready to take carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology to the next level. On May 15, the country’s government tentatively approved a project that would capture emissions from a cement plant and a waste-to-energy power plant in Oslo, then ship them to the North Sea, where they will be buried underground. The Norwegian government also approved €29 million ($34 million) in funding for the project.

The approval, however, comes with caveats. For one, the government moved its deadline to make a final decision on going ahead with construction to 2021, two years later than previously planned. The new plan also drops previously proposed support for capturing emissions from a third industrial emitter, a chemical plant producing ammonia. Proponents of the project aren’t happy with the slow progress. “It is vital that government starts to step-up and turn its strong words on CCS into firm commitments,” said Olav Øye, CCS adviser at the environmental nonprofit the Bellona Foundation, in a statement. “If it doesn’t, it’s not just Norwegians that will suffer, it will be the whole world.”

The decision to drop the ammonia plant, owned by Oslo-based chemical company Yara International, is also controversial. In theory, because the Yara plant produces a near pure stream of carbon dioxide, it would cost less to institute a CCS project there than it would at the other two sites. (That’s because the other sites will require specific technology to separate CO2 from other byproducts.)

Industry insiders say Yara had lost interest in the project. The company already sells some of the carbon dioxide it produces for industrial use (for use in carbonated beverages, for example), and a Yara spokesperson says any additional capture would be “complicated” and may not provide any returns on investment. Click here to read more