Speech at CCS seminar

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Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,

It is a pleasure for me to welcome you to Bergen, and to this seminar on Carbon Capture Technologies.

Yesterday’s opening of Technology Centre Mongstad, TCM, was a milestone. It was an important event not only for Norway, but also for the international work on Carbon Capture and Storage – CCS.

TCM is one of the first large demonstration plants for CCS. It is also the first of its kind to test two different types of capture technologies from two different sources of CO2, side-by-side.

Developing technologies for CCS is absolutely essential to solve the dual challenge of meeting the world’s energy demand and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The world’s population has just reached 7 billion. In 2050 it will probably be around 9 billion. It is obvious that the demand for energy will continue to rise.

At the same time, we need to cut emissions dramatically in order to avoid a temperature increase of more than 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.

These are the main challenges the world is facing today. There is no easy solution and no quick-fix. We need to act on a number of areas simultaneously in order to address the challenges.

We need to invest in low-emission technologies. We need to invest heavily in renewable energy production. And we need to intensify our work on energy efficiency. In addition, we need to reduce emissions from the production and use of fossil fuels, and we need to uncouple economic growth and greenhouse gas emissions.

Not a small order, nor a cheap one. But the alternative is worse. And without CCS, it will be even more difficult and even more expensive. According to the IEA, without CCS, the estimated cost of reaching the 2 degree target increases by 70%.

Although we have been working on CCS for more than three decades, the technology is still in its infancy. Much work remains before the technology can be commercialized and widely deployed. What we need now is a number of large scale demonstration plants.

This is where the Technology Centre Mongstad will play an important role.

I believe that we are in a good position to move our CCS work further. Both because we are strongly committed to this work, and also because we have important experience to build on.

As our Energy Minister said at the opening yesterday, it is important to remember that CCS it not a pipe dream. It is taking place on a day-to-day basis, and in Norway we have been doing it for more than 15 years.

The Norwegian Government is strongly committed to making CCS a commercially viable mitigation option. We have considerable experience with storing CO2.

At the Sleipner Vest field in the North Sea, CCS has been taking place since 1996. Every year one million tonnes of CO2 have been separated from gas production, and stored in the Utsira formation.

Utsira is a geological formation 1000 metres below the seabed. The Sleipner experience shows that CO2 can be stored in geological reservoirs in the same way as oil and gas have been stored for millions of years. In other words, CCS works!

We find another CCS project at the Snøhvit field, in north of Norway.

We continue to build on our valuable experience. With Technology Centre Mongstad, we take our CCS efforts one step further.

I am truly proud of what we have achieved at Mongstad, and I have high expectations for what we will achieve when testing starts.

I think we must acknowledge that there are considerable challenges for the work on CCS internationally.

According to the Global CCS Institute there are 8 large scale projects in operation. 7 large scale projects under development and 60 CCS projects in various planning phases. We have also seen that deployment of CCS is more complex than we initially thought.

This is probably why we see that global CCS deployment is behind schedule compared to the targets set at the political level. The first full-scale power plant with CCS is yet to be operational. There are significant challenges that we need to address:

We need to reduce costs and close the financing gap. We must accelerate the deployment. We need a number of large scale demonstration projects, and solve technical issues of integration and scale-up.

We need to acquire more experience with CO2 storage. It is also necessary to engage with the public and achieve public acceptance. In Europe, we see considerable resistance to the issue of storage, and particularly to on-shore storage. Promising projects have been stopped due to public opposition. Public acceptance may be an issue that we haven’t been paying enough attention to.

Some building blocks are in place, and we must make use of the “lessons learned”. At the same time, I believe the deployment of CCS is more complex than we initially thought. We are behind schedule in terms of the deployment rate targets set at the highest political level.

Regional and country-level initiatives are crucial. One example is the policies of the European Union, which has been important for the emergence of large-scale integrated CCS projects. Market-based instruments, financial mechanisms, a legal framework, and a price tag on emissions have all contributed to this.

This kind of leadership is important because we find ourselves in a situation where initial project funding is crucial. I believe governments have a responsibility to bridge the commercial gap during this demonstration phase – especially in today’s global economic turmoil.

I am a believer in efficient policy signals to spearhead efforts and commitments. If we as governments are clear in our roles and projections, industry will follow in preparing for the future market.  We need to make green growth a mainstream incentive for investments.  This is achievable through targeted government measures, even without overall economic instruments in place on the international scene.

I also think seminars like this are valuable. It is important that international front-runners on CCS meet to discuss status and the way forward. And it is important that we can have an open discussion about the possibilities as well as potential stumbling blocks ahead of us.

And of course, I am particularly pleased that we can meet in the beautiful Norwegian city of Bergen. I look forward to a fruitful discussion here today, and also hope you will be able to see some of the city before you leave.

Thank you for your attention!