Name: Norway and CO2 emissions | DW Documentary
Uploaded: 2021-09-26T15:15:35.000Z
Duration: 25 min 57 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The oil company Equinor is doing something extraordinary

on the Sleipner gas platform in the North Sea.

It pumps millions of tons of carbon dioxide under the sea bed:

And Equinor has plans to sequester even more carbon dioxide.

The storage potential in the North Sea is large enough to handle a

substantial part if not everything that comes out of Europe.

Can that work? Will ships with CO2 soon be going to Norway

to sink our climate problem under the North Sea?

The technologies exist, but do they really advance

climate protection or are we just buying time?

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on

Climate Change, we can only emit a maximum

of around 330 billion tons of CO2 if the rise in global temperature is to

stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius. We are currently releasing

around 42 billion tons a year. If we carry on as before, the CO2 budget

would be used up in around 8 years, by 2028.

Steps like closing coal-fired power plants,

and switching to electric cars will cause CO2 emissions to decrease.

The more ambitious we are, the more they go down. But keeping the

increase below 330 billion tons seems a hopeless cause.

And it means there'll be more CO2 that has to be removed from the air.

We need reforestation. We have to think about how to deal

every decade, we will still have to remove

from the atmosphere by the end of the century.

So, we have to ask ourselves where we can put it.

Norway has a lot of experience removing and storing CO2.

Equinor extracts natural gas on a peninsula near

Hammerfest, the northernmost city in Europe.

Andreas Sandvik is in charge of the plant. He is proud that a way has

been found here to get rid of CO2, but also to deliver

an immense amount of fossil energy to Europe.

Typically energy for a city of 60,000 inhabitants

for a whole year that's about 1.2 gigawatts. So it's amazing.

CO2 is always a by-product of natural gas extraction. But the crucial thing

here is that it flows back under the North Sea. The system is

controlled remotely from the command center. There is no offshore platform.

One pipeline brings natural gas to the plant,

while another carries CO2 back under the sea.

In this, the gas stream coming in, about 6%

unique about this plant, because we remove the CO2, we dry it

and compress it and we push it back to a separate reservoir offshore

for permanent storage. 90 tons an hour, almost 800,000 tons

a year that we store permanently in this reservoir, offshore 143 kms out.

would like to benefit from this experience. Equinor is in the process

of establishing a new business model — it calls the project Northern Lights.

As early as 2023, the first ships will bring

A new pipeline descends steeply from the coast, then runs 110 kilometers

along the sea floor, to a point where the greenhouse gases are

injected 2,500 meters deep into the North Sea sediment.

Sverre Overå is responsible for the new field of business.

It's his job to lead the company into the future.

Norway is seeing this as an opportunity here

to actually continue to use the resources

that are in the North Sea, not as an energy provider

but as a storage provider for industrial CO2.

Construction of the plants has started, and

The gigantic Northern Lights project is meant to pave the way

for the large-scale storage of CO2. Its initial goal is to

free Europe's industries from greenhouse gases.

If we succeed then we have the opportunity to actually help

clean up quite a few of the industries that have no other option and we will

allow these industries actually to stay here in Europe. It's hard

to see a world without steel, it's hard to see a future without cement.

They are essential and they need to decarbonize as well.

Even if steel production switches to renewable energy sources, there will

always be an amount of CO2 left over from the manufacturing process.

Looking at German industry as a whole, this remaining CO2

accounts for around 7 percent of CO2 emissions. If Europe

is serious about climate protection, these emissions must also be stopped.

But is it realistic that freighters will bring CO2 from Germany to Norway?

Today there are only four ships like the Froya worldwide.

Tommy Pederson is responsible for loading the tanker.

In the Norwegian port of Porsgrunn, it takes on CO2 that

was released during the production of fertilizers.

The gas is delivered to the food industry, which uses it in

beer and fizzy drinks, for example, or for cooling.

Today, CO2 is a commodity in small quantities.

After the gas has been cooled and compressed,

The tank holds 1500 tons of CO2. Assuming that all of the

carbon dioxide produced by German industry would be transported by ships

like the Froya, around 100 of these tankers

would have to travel from Germany to Norway every day.

But that's not a problem for the specialist.

In theory it will be just a cost calculation,

from around the North Sea down into the northern sea seabed.

I'm sure if this is a technology that those companies will chose,

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Norway and CO2 emissions | DW Documentary

alternative

scale

cultivate

amount