Speech at roundtable meeting in Brazil

Check against delivery.

Widespread use of CCS at the lowest possible cost will be necessary to decarbonise the industry and achieve the goals we have committed to in the Paris Agreement.

Norway has 28 years of experience with safe storage of CO2 under the seabed – we know how to store CO₂ safely and permanently.

I am also proud to say that Norway has the world’s largest and most flexible test facility for CO2 capture technology. Technology Center Mongstad, instrumental in improving capture technology.

Longship is Norway’s largest climate project and Europe’s first complete value-chain for CCS. It will be fully operational in 2025.

For the progress in Longship so far, we can report that the overall construction is over 80 percent completed.

The transport and storage solution provided by Northern Lights is completed. We celebrated this milestone event last week, on 26 September. Longship is now ready to receive CO2 from industry across Europe.

The construction of the CO2-capture facility at Heidelberg Materials’ cement factory in Brevik is over 80 percent completed.  The absorber, which is the largest and heaviest unit, at 275 tons, in the CCS plant has been successfully installed as well as the absorber stack which ranges 100 meters above the ground. 

We also need to develop attractive business models for CCUS.The commercial interest for CCS in European markets keeps growing: Northern Lights has entered into commercial agreements with Yara in the Netherlands and Ørsted in Denmark on the transport and storage of CO2.

Norway wants to offer commercial storage of CO2 as a service and a market opportunity for emission sources in Europe.

Norway has signed bilateral MoUs with four EU countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden) on cross-border transport of CO2 with the purpose of permanent storage. This will facilitate cross-border CCS projects.

Over the past two years, we have awarded ten exploration licenses for CO2 storage on the Norwegian continental shelf. If all the projects that have been granted licenses meet their high ambitions, we will have capacity to store more than 40 million tonnes annually from the early 2030s.

Thank you.