October 6, 2023[Rigzone]- Four companies have put forward two bids for acreage in the Norwegian North Sea to store carbon dioxide (CO2).

The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD) said in a media release that the applications were submitted to the authorities according to regulations relating to the exploitation of subsea reservoirs on the continental shelf for CO2 storage and transportation.

The NPD has mapped potential storage facilities for CO2 on the Norwegian shelf, coming up with an atlas. The atlas shows that it is possible to store more than 80 billion metric tons of CO2 on the shelf, which is equivalent to the current level of Norwegian CO2 emissions, for 1,000 years, the regulator said.

According to the NPD, the authorities have awarded a first permit to exploit an area for injection and storage of CO2 in January. The awarded area is located near the Troll field in the North Sea.

In September 2018, the Northern Lights project handed in an application to inject and store CO2 underground on the Norwegian continental shelf. Global energy majors Equinor ASA, Shell PLC and TotalEnergies SE are behind the Northern Lights project.

Equinor said that the Northern Lights project is part of the Norwegian full-scale carbon capture and storage project called Longship. The full-scale project includes the capture of CO2 from industrial sources and the shipping of liquid CO2 to an onshore terminal on the Norwegian west coast. From there, the liquified CO2 will be transported by pipeline to an offshore storage location subsea in the North Sea for permanent storage.

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