Norway inaugurated Thursday the gateway to a massive undersea vault for carbon dioxide, a crucial step before opening what its operator calls the first commercial service offering CO2 transport and storage.
The Northern Lights project plans to take CO2 emissions captured at factory smokestacks in Europe and inject them into geological reservoirs under the seabed.
It will have an initial capacity of 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year, before being ramped up to five million tonnes in a second phase if there is enough demand.
The world’s overall capture capacity is currently just 50.5 million tonnes, according to the IEA, or barely 0.1 percent of the world’s annual total emissions.