The first commercial carbon storage installation in the world begins operations, injecting CO2 deeply under the seabed of the North Sea

Oslo —The first sales service in the world offering carbon storage off the Norwegian coast carried out its inaugural CO2 injection in the seabed of the North Sea, the Northern Lights consortium said on Monday.

The Northern Lights project, led by oil giants Equinor, Shell and Totalengies, is to transport and bury the CO2 captured in chimneys across Europe. The goal is to prevent emissions from being released in the atmosphere, and thus help stop climate change.

“We have now injected and stored the very first CO2 safely in the tank,” said Northern Lights, Tim Heijn, in a statement. “Our ships, installations and wells are now in service.”

In concrete terms, once the CO2 is captured, it is liquefied and transported by the ship to the Oygarden terminal near Bergen on the west coast of Norway.

It is then transferred to large tanks before being injected through a 68 -mile pipeline in the seabed, at a depth of about 1.6 mile, for permanent storage.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) Technology has been listed as a climatic tool by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency (AIE), in particular to reduce the CO2 footprint of industries such as cement and steel which are difficult to decarbonize.

The first CO2 injection into the Northern Lights geological reservoir came from the Heidelberg materials cement plant in Germany in Brevik, southeast of Norway.

But CCS technology is complex, controversial and costly.

Without financial help, it is currently more profitable for industries to buy “pollution permit” on the European carbon market than pay for the capture, transport and storage of their CO2.

Northern Lights has so far signed only three commercial contracts in Europe. One is with an Ammonia Yara factory in the Netherlands, another with two of the Orsted biofuels factories in Denmark, and the third with a thermal power station in Stockholm Exergi in Sweden.

Largely funded by the Norwegian State, Northern Lights has an annual CO2 storage capacity of 1.7 million tonnes, which should increase to 5.5 million tonnes by the end of the decade.

While efforts such as Northern Lights focus on capturing carbon directly from the most polluting sources – industrial smoke piles – efforts have also been launched to capture gas from ambient air, an even more controversial methodology.

Mark Jacobson, professor of environmental engineering at the University of Stanford, told CBS News earlier this year that he was doubtful of the motivations and efficiency of the two types of carbon capture, and he said that “direct air capture is not a real solution. We have no time to waste with this unused technology”.

Jacobson thinks that the capture of direct air, in particular, is a boondoggy, and more efforts should be focused on the passage to clean energy sources.

Currently, the United States has obtained around 60% of its electricity from fossil fuels.

“You have to think about who offers this technology,” said Jacobson. “Who should benefit from carbon capture and direct air capture? These are fossil fuel companies.”

“They simply say:” Well, we extract as much CO2 as we emit. Therefore, we should be allowed to continue to pollute, to continue to extract, “Jacobson told CBS News, adding that his position has not made it popular among many in the energy sector.

“Oh, yes, diesel people hate me, people of essence hate me, Esthanol people hate me, nuclear power hate me, coal people hate me. They do it, because I tell the truth,” he said. “We don’t need any of these technologies.”