Equinor is aiming to store some 20mn t/y of CO₂ at Smeaheia, located about 50 km from Mongstad, which would represent a significant step up in carbon capture and storage (CCS) capacity on the Norwegian Continental Shelf.

Northern Lights, the company’s initial CO₂ storage facility in the Longship project in the North Sea, has a target injection capacity of 1.5mn t/y in Phase 1 from 2024, with plans to develop the capacity to 5–6mn t/y from around 2026. Through these two projects, Equinor aims to contribute to CO₂ reductions equivalent to half of Norway’s annual emissions.

Equinor has also announced ambitions to develop further storage licences in the North Sea in the future, with the aim of building a common, pipeline-based infrastructure that can contribute to substantial cost reductions for the CCS value chain.

Elsewhere, the planned Polaris CO₂ storage development lies about 100 km off the coast of Finnmark, in the Barents Sea. This site is part of the Barents Blue project which Equinor is developing in collaboration with Vår Eneri and Horisont Energi. Plans are for an ammonia production facility at Markoppneset in Hammerfest that will reform natural gas from the Barents Sea to blue ammonia using CCS. The first stage of the development includes capture, transport and storage of 2mn t/y of CO₂.

In October 2021 Equinor launched the Norway Energy Hub, which comprises four building blocks – decarbonisation of oil and gas, industrialisation of offshore wind, commercialisation of CCS and large-scale hydrogen production. Equinor aims to develop value chains for the transport and storage of 15–30mn t/y of CO₂ by 2035