Addressing climate change was one of the biggest challenges of our time, Norwegian ambassador to South Africa Trine Skymoen said at the fourth South African Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Conference, held in Sandton, Gauteng, last month.

She noted that the world’s leaders would gather in Paris for COP 21 later this month and, hopefully, reach a climate agreement that safeguarded development in line with the 2° target stipulated in the Copenhagen Accord that was established during COP 15.

“Owing to its great potential, we see CCS as part of the solution to reduce emissions and help meet the 2° climate change target. We are pleased to note that South Africa – like Norway – has included CCS as part of its intended nationally determined contributions.”

She added that Norway aims to be at the forefront of CCS and is working hard to increase international understanding and acceptance for the capture and storage of carbon dioxide ( CO2) as a necessary mitigation effort.

Skymoen said climate change needed to be addressed using what she referred to as the dual challenge – mitigating climate change while securing sustainable energy supply – adding that “Norway firmly believes that CCS has a crucial role to play in meeting this challenge”.

Skymoen pointed out that there were currently 7.2-billion people on the planet, which would rise to nine-billion in 20 years’ time. Population growth and economic development – particularly in countries that were not members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – all indicated increasing energy use and, if they were to achieve continued growth, they had to have stable and secure access to energy, she added.

“If we are to curb the rise in global temperatures to a maximum of 2° – global greenhouse-gas emissions will have to be reduced by 50% to 85% by 2050.”

South Africa is addressing the dual challenge, with CCS being one of them.

She noted that, over the past 25 years, Norway had – through a public–private partnership with the petroleum sector– led the way in CCS. Since 1996, the country had gained extensive experience of storing CO2 in offshore geological structures and was strongly committed to further developing and contributing to the widespread dissemination of CCS technologies.

“Our CCS policy includes a wide range of activities – research, development and demon-stration, work on the realisation of large-scale demonstration facilities, transport, storage and the alternative use of CO2,” Skymoen explained.

She said the policy also involved efforts to pro-mote CCS internationally and to share knowledge and experience.

Various activities were needed to reduce the costs and perceived risks associated with large-scale CCS projects, and the first CCS projects should be used as reference projects for future CCS development, Skymoen noted.

“The only large-scale CCS projects currently operating in Europe are the Sleipner, Gudrun and Snøhvit gasfields on the Norwegian continental shelf. In these projects, CO2 is separated from natural gas before the gas is transported to cus-tomers,” she said, adding that these projects had proved that capturing and storing CO2subsea worked.

Skymoen noted that Norway had invested heavily in the research, development and demonstration of CCS over the past decade. The CO2 Technology Centre Mongstad (TCM), in Norway, is the world’s largest facility for testing and improving CO2 capture technologies. “The technology centre is a cornerstone in our efforts,” she declared.

TCM bridges a gap in the technology development chain by allowing for the testing and operating of capture technologies on an industrial scale. The international development of CO2-capture technologies is one of the main ambitions of TCM.

“We are pleased that chemicals and energy company Sasol has been an active and valuable partner of TCM, together with Statoil and Shell, and the Norwegian State enterprise specialising in CCS, Gassnova.”

She noted that a clear recommendation from the CCS expertise was that further full-scale demonstration was necessary if the learning curve was to be ramped up while reducing costs.