NNot all greenhouse gases can be avoided. When cement, glass or aluminum are produced, for example, the carbon dioxide bound in the raw materials inevitably escapes. If industry is to produce “climate-neutral” for the foreseeable future, there is only one thing left according to current knowledge: capture these greenhouse gases and store them permanently. Best in exploited natural gas or oil fields under the sea.
CCS – Carbon Capture and Storage – is the name of the technology. And even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assumes that there can be no climate-neutral economy without them. In the energy transition country of Germany, however, CCS is banned with the exception of test facilities. Fear of leaks, earth movements or the release of pollutants underground have repeatedly led to public protests and the shutdown of test facilities. No country in Europe emits more carbon dioxide than Germany.
The German energy group Wintershall Dea and the Norwegian energy giant Equinor are now trying to make a mutually beneficial deal out of this dilemma. The vision: to connect the country with the highest carbon dioxide emissions with the potentially largest storage country in Europe via a pipeline.
German double standards
According to Wintershall Dea, by 2032 both want to lay a 900-kilometer-long tube from the north German coast to the undersea storage sites off Bergen and Stavanger. Industry is to be connected directly to the sea tube via a network of pipes on land. From production straight to storage, that’s the idea.
Image: FAZ
Both companies assume that they can transport and store up to 40 million tons of carbon dioxide a year in this way – according to Wintershall Dea, that would be one fifth of all German industrial emissions.
The project would be a milestone in the energy transition and give Wintershall the opportunity, as announced, to expand business outside of gas production in Russia. At the same time, the planned pipeline shows the whole double standard of the German restructuring. Like nuclear energy or the liquefied gas from North America that is extracted via “fracking”, CCS is also a technology without which the energy transition in Germany would currently not work, but which is nevertheless prohibited in this country.
Wintershall emphasized on Tuesday that the project is only just beginning. The company did not give any financial details. However, he made it clear that transport and storage by ship could be possible even before the pipeline was completed.
Scholz and Støre follow through with action
The consortium wants to limit itself to the construction of the underwater pipeline. On land, the companies want to use the carbon dioxide pipeline network planned by the former E.ON subsidiary OGE. OGE, the largest long-distance gas network operator in Germany, announced in April that it would build a closed pipeline network for carbon dioxide together with the Belgian energy company TES. By 2028, according to the plans, the network should “initially” be 1000 kilometers long and be able to transport 18 million carbon dioxide a year.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre announced at a meeting in mid-August that they would expand the energy partnership. Norway already supplies 40 percent of the gas required in Germany. In Oslo, Scholz praised the technological advances made by CCS. However, he kept a low profile on the question of whether the technology should also be used in Germany.
For industry, saving could become big business. Over the weekend, the “Northern Light” consortium – Equinor, Shell and Total – had what they say was the world’s first contract for a cross-border CO2-Transport with subsequent storage closed. The fertilizer company Yara wants to separate 800,000 tons of the climate-damaging gas in its Dutch plant, liquefy it and ship it to Norway, where it will remain 2,600 meters under the sea.
