The EU as well Norway are aiming to collaborate together to develop infrastructure so as to capture as well as store the CO2 emissions and also scale up the renewable hydrogen production across Europe as per the draft alliance plan. This plan is going to be announced at a summit of the European country leaders and ministers at Ostend, Belgium, on April 24. The plan will focus on making the North Sea an engine when it comes to offshore renewable energy as well as clean energy technologies.
As per a draught seen by Reuters, the 27-nation EU and Norway plan to develop European market rules and infrastructure to capture, transport, use, and store CO2 emissions. Both sides intend to collaborate together to bring this key technology across markets in order to foster the decarbonization of the hard-to-abate industrial verticals.
It signalled the same intent to tag with hydrogen produced from a renewable source, another green technology the European Union is betting on so as to decarbonize heavy industrial segments such as steel as well as cement making.
Efforts so as to capture the CO2 emissions from the sector and thereafter store them underground in the North Sea have gone on to gather pace lately as nations race towards meeting their respective climate goals, with Norwegian firms falling short of some of the main projects.
It is well to note that the state-owned company of Norway, Equinor, has been capturing and storing CO2 emissions from the Sleipner gas fields since the 1990s. Its soon to-come projects include the Northern Lights, a collaboration that will be done to capture CO2 emissions from industrial facilities and also inject almost 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year at the seabed nearby the Troll gas field starting in 2024.
In the draught statement, which can still be changed before it is embraced, Norway and the EU also go on to intensify their partnership so as to protect the Arctic.
The statement did reflect planned cooperation between both sides on fossil fuels. It is well to note that Norway went on to pipe 117 billion cubic metres of gas to the European Union as well as Britain in 2022, thereby making it Europe’s largest supplier of gas after Russia decreased its deliveries last year.