Equinor has been granted operatorships for development of carbon dioxide (CO2) storages Smeaheia in the North Sea and Polaris in the Barents Sea by the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy.
In its application, Equinor submitted plans to develop the CO2 storage capacity in Smeaheia at 20 million tonnes per year (tpy). Northern Lights, the CO2 storage facility in the Longship project, has a planned injection capacity of 1.5 million tpy in Phase 1 available from 2024 with plans to develop the capacity to 5-6 million tpy from around 2026.
In the Barents Sea, about 100 km off the coast of Finnmark, lies the CO2 storage Polaris. It is part of the Barents Blue project which Equinor is developing with Vår Energi and Horisont Energi. The project is developing an ammonia production plant at Markoppneset in Hammerfest that will reform natural gas from the Barents Sea to blue ammonia using carbon capture and storage (CCS). The first stage of the development includes capture, transport, and storage of two million tpy of CO2.
In October 2021 Equinor launched Norway energy hub, which consists of four building blocks: decarbonization of oil and gas, industrialization of offshore wind, commercialization of CCS and large-scale hydrogen production. The overall goal is to develop value chains for CO2 transport and storage with an annual capacity of 15-30 million tonnes of CO2 within 2035.
