The oil company Equinor is
doing something extraordinary on the Sleipner gas
platform in the North Sea. It pumps millions of tons of
carbon dioxide under the sea bed: The greenhouse gas
that threatens to warm the planet is
simply bunkered away. And Equinor has plans to sequester
even more carbon dioxide. The storage potential in the North
Sea is large enough to handle a substantial part if not everything
that comes out of Europe. Can that work? Will ships with
CO2 soon be going to Norway to sink our climate problem
under the North Sea? The technologies exist, but
do they really advance climate protection or are
we just buying time? According to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we can
only emit a maximum of around 330 billion tons of CO2 if
the rise in global temperature is to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
We are currently releasing around 42 billion tons a year. If we
carry on as before, the CO2 budget would be used up in
around 8 years, by 2028. Steps like closing
coal-fired power plants, expanding the use of
renewable energies and switching to electric cars will
cause CO2 emissions to decrease. The more ambitious we are, the
more they go down. But keeping the increase below 330 billion
tons seems a hopeless cause. And it means there’ll be more CO2
that has to be removed from the air. We need reforestation. We have
to think about how to deal with our bogs, but that
won't be enough. Even if we cut our CO2
emissions in half every decade, we will
still have to remove several hundred
million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere by
the end of the century. So, we have to ask ourselves
where we can put it. Norway has a lot of experience
removing and storing CO2. Equinor extracts natural
gas on a peninsula near Hammerfest, the northernmost
city in Europe. Andreas Sandvik is in charge of the
plant. He is proud that a way has been found here to get rid
of CO2, but also to deliver an immense amount of
fossil energy to Europe. It is amazing. It's
a lot of energy. Typically energy for a city
of 60,000 inhabitants for a whole year that’s about
1.2 gigawatts. So it’s amazing. CO2 is always a by-product of natural
gas extraction. But the crucial thing here is that it flows back under
the North Sea. The system is controlled remotely from the command
center. There is no offshore platform. One pipeline brings
natural gas to the plant, while another carries
CO2 back under the sea. In this, the gas stream
coming in, about 6% of the content is CO2.
And this is quite unique about this plant, because
we remove the CO2, we dry it and compress it and we push it back
to a separate reservoir offshore for permanent storage. 90 tons
an hour, almost 800,000 tons a year that we store permanently in
this reservoir, offshore 143 kms out. The state-owned company
that made Norway one of the richest
countries on earth would like to benefit from this
experience. Equinor is in the process of establishing a new business model —
it calls the project Northern Lights. As early as 2023, the
first ships will bring CO2 from European
industry to Norway. A new pipeline descends steeply from
the coast, then runs 110 kilometers along the sea floor, to a point
where the greenhouse gases are injected 2,500 meters deep
into the North Sea sediment. Sverre Overå is responsible for
the new field of business. It’s his job to lead the
company into the future. Norway is seeing this
as an opportunity here to actually continue
to use the resources that are in the North Sea,
not as an energy provider but as a storage provider
for industrial CO2. Construction of the
plants has started, and the first test drilling
has been done. The gigantic Northern Lights
project is meant to pave the way for the large-scale storage of CO2.
Its initial goal is to free Europe’s industries
from greenhouse gases. If we succeed then we have the
opportunity to actually help clean up quite a few of the industries
that have no other option and we will allow these industries actually
to stay here in Europe. It’s hard to see a world without steel, it’s
hard to see a future without cement. They are essential and they
need to decarbonize as well. Even if steel production switches to
renewable energy sources, there will always be an amount of CO2 left over
from the manufacturing process. Looking at German industry as
a whole, this remaining CO2 accounts for around 7 percent
of CO2 emissions. If Europe is serious about climate protection,
these emissions must also be stopped. But is it realistic that freighters
will bring CO2 from Germany to Norway? Today there are only four ships
like the Froya worldwide. Tommy Pederson is responsible
for loading the tanker. In the Norwegian port of
Porsgrunn, it takes on CO2 that was released during the
production of fertilizers. The gas is delivered to the
food industry, which uses it in beer and fizzy drinks, for
example, or for cooling. Today, CO2 is a commodity
in small quantities. After the gas has been
cooled and compressed, the Froya transports
it in liquid form. The tank holds 1500 tons of CO2.
Assuming that all of the carbon dioxide produced by German
industry would be transported by ships like the Froya, around
100 of these tankers would have to travel from
Germany to Norway every day. But that’s not a problem
for the specialist. In theory it will be
just a cost calculation, how is the optimum
size of the ship, from around the North Sea down
into the northern sea seabed. I’m sure if this is a technology
that those companies will chose, they will calculate the
right size of the ship. So, shipping CO2 to Norway is
plausible. But would those millions of tons of greenhouse gases really
stay put under the ocean floor? This is the Kieshof Mire near
Greifswald in eastern Germany. Prof. Hans Joosten has many objections
to the idea of sinking our greenhouse gases using technical processes.
He believes our priority should be to restore natural CO2
stores, such as bogs. We have to get away from the illusion
that we can do business as usual and develop a technology that
compensates for all our sins. Joosten is Dutch. He has researched
bogs all over the world, works on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change and is called "the peat pope“. Here Joosten tries to understand
the origin and development of bogs in the meter-thick
layers of peat. These are actually my favorite peat
to taste. These water peat mosses. They taste very fine, often sulfurous.
Sulfide-like. And of course we have to use all of our senses
to better understand nature. We always think that we need a lot
of devices to measure things, but we shouldn’t forget that
we can do an incredible amount with our eyes and ears,
our noses and our mouths. There are hardly any idyllic places
like this left in Germany: 99% of bogs have been drained and thus destroyed.
This has made them climate killers - because all
the peat that a bog like this stores is then gradually released
into the atmosphere. That’s pure stored carbon. Half of
this plant matter consists of carbon and that is stored away. It then
grows up layer by layer. With us in in the order of 1/2 mm to 1 mm per
year. Over thousands of years these layers are meters thick
and contain a great deal of carbon. That is pure
climate protection. This only applies to intact bogs.
Since almost all bogs in Germany have been drained, they give off
a lot of greenhouse gases - almost 6% of total emissions.
More than air traffic. We calculated that if we restore water
to drained bogs, we will be able to compensate for even more than
the warming caused by CO2 emissions since the industrial
revolution. So bog re-wetting is a very important step — along
with creating cooling systems for a world that is
getting warmer anyway. That would be desirable.
But how would it be possible to restore
bogs to their natural state in an industrialized
country like Germany? The largest oil and gas deposits in
the North Sea are here, off the coast of Stavanger in Norway. The
plans would mean pumping would continue here, but in
the opposite direction, after those deposits
are eventually exhausted. But would the CO2 from
European industry really stay underground or would
it become a time bomb? I think we can use
the example that oil and gas is in the
ground and it stays there until we try to take it out.
And what we doing essentially
is the reverse. We’re placing CO2 in the ground. The headquarters of the
Norwegian Petroleum Directorate is also here in Stavanger. It makes
decisions on the resources under the North Sea, issues drilling
licenses and inspects rock formations. Fridtijov Riis is a geologist who has
long been searching in the drill core archive for the
optimum sediment into which the first industrial
carbon dioxide will be injected. We have been looking at possible
storage options for many years. I think I started with this in 2006.
And one of the first suggestions from our side was this Johanson
formation because it’s one of the good sandstones. I
can touch it, feel it, I feel this is sand with a lot of
pore space between the grains. Under the North Sea, the
pores of the sandstone are filled with water.
Most of the injected CO2 dissolves in it — turning
it into sparkling water. The bigger the pores, the
easier the gas can spread. You can test it with your own, just
blowing it and see if you can get some air through it. This is quite good. I don’t need to get too much force
on my blow to get the air through. The Johanson Formation, which
is intended to absorb the CO2, lies below the Troll Field: a gas
deposit that contains another 30 years’ supply of the fossil fuel.
In between are several layers
of dense shale rock. The Base of the Johanson formation
is this red, somewhere in this area. Because of the gas production
from the Troll field, the pressure is falling in these more
shallow reservoirs, that means even if there should be a little bit
of leakage of CO2 from this one, it cannot escape from the under
pressure in the overlaying sands. So far everything has been going well
with the storage of CO2 in Norway. At the Sleipner gas drilling platform,
more than 1 million tons of CO2 have been pumped back underground
every year for 25 years. The Northern Lights project aims to
start with 1.5 million tons per year. If you look at the sheer magnitude
of the problem globally there is a need for thousands of facilities
and we’re talking hundreds of millions of tons per year.
That needs to be handled. Carbon capture and storage, or CCS,
has also been researched in Germany. A 2017 experiment was a success.
The CO2 remained in the ground under Ketzin, in
eastern Germany, but it raised fears of earthquakes and escaping gases.
Since then, the storage of CO2 has been politically
dead in Germany. Even research is
essentially prohibited. In Ketzin, where I was also deeply
involved in the safety concept, I would have gladly built a house
close to the storage facility at any time without any worries. I
would have been worried if I’d put it in the wrong place in the
wrong way with the wrong partner. For Frank Schilling it is clear that
countries like Germany that emit a lot of CO2 also have to
take responsibility for it. He says CCS
is indispensable. There are estimates that in Europe
we have enough storage space for 1000 years for our CO2 emissions.
At the moment we have CCS as a good alternative. If someone
has a better one in 30 years, all the better. But right now we
have to improve the technology so that it is safe and
also controlled safely. Hans Joosten’s top priority when it
comes to climate protection is to return the bogs to their natural state
and thus stop their CO2 emissions. Here in the Recknitz region near
Rostock on the eastern German coast he is researching how a
re-wetted bog can become a CO2 store again
in the long term. The Tribsee Bog was drained over
the centuries. This allowed oxygen to penetrate the bog soil and
break it down. That released a lot of carbon. It was
re-flooded 20 years ago. During the period it was without
water, it was a system in decline. We have calculated that
we lost 2.7 meters of peat at this location over
the last few decades. And now we are looking to see
whether we can not only stop these processes, but also turn them
around in order to get new peat formation at
higher water levels. The scale of the problem is vast:
Half of northern Germany has been drained to grow potatoes or corn,
or to graze animals. Each hectare then emits as much CO2 in
a single year - 29 tons - as a car does in a typical
lifespan of 200,000 kilometers. In Hankhausen in the northwest,
landscape ecologist Gerald Jurasinski is investigating what happens when
a drained bog is flooded again. He discovered that at first
it produces methane - another very dangerous
greenhouse gas. But after a few years the
methane emissions decrease and then the bog begins to
store CO2 over the long term. We have just extrapolated
that, for all areas that are currently
drained globally. And you can see very clearly
that the faster we return water to the bogs, the better
it is for the climate. Drained bogs make up seven percent
of arable land in Germany. Is it even possible
to turn back time? If we take climate protection
seriously, we have no alternative. When you understand that agriculture
on bogs in Germany causes annual climate damage of 7.4
billion euros - which corresponds exactly to the total added value of
the whole of agriculture - then you have to ask yourself: what are
we doing here? Why is it that an activity that causes 7, 8, 9
thousand euros damage per hectare is allowed, and even subsidized. Because
of course these greenhouse gases that are emitted must be
compensated for somewhere else. Somebody else has to pay for it. It won’t be easy to restructure
agriculture and convince farmers to turn huge areas of farmland
into wet bogs again. If we follow the Norwegians’ plan
for dealing with CO2, Europe will soon have lots of
facilities like the Klemetsrud waste-to-energy
plant near Oslo. Here CO2 is filtered from the
flue gases. This could serve as a model for other industry
sectors that have not yet been able to make their
production carbon-neutral. Jannicke Bjerkås initiated
the CCS project at the waste-to-energy
plant in 2014. I’m proud and I believe that
it’s meaningful to work with it because this could actually
make a difference. This is something we need do in order
to basically save this world. Bjerkås wants to prove
that it is possible to remove CO2 from
industrial emissions. The waste-to-energy plant releases
400,000 tons of CO2 every year. The small pilot plant can only
collect 1000 tons of it per year. But that shows that it can work. When it comes to the capture rates,
the technology has proven to be extremely effective and we have
managed to capture more than 95% of the CO2 from the pilot plants.
When it comes to the energy use, it’s quite energy demanding. That usually makes capturing CO2
very expensive. But that’s not a problem here in the
waste-to-energy plant. There is an abundance
of waste heat here. The big challenge is to make capturing
CO2 economical. Its share in the flue gases is only 5-10%.
It is important to find the
right chemicals that can bind and enrich the CO2.
They are then removed with heat and used again. It’s quite costly today because
we are at the very beginning of the development. There are only
a few plants operating to today and none of them are actually
on industrial sources. The biggest challenges is, that
today’s economy is not favoring the handling of CO2. It
is more attractive businesswise simply to emit the CO2. A high price for CO2 could make
carbon capture and storage increasingly attractive. Since
around half of the waste in this waste-to-energy plant consists of
biomass, CO2 is even indirectly extracted from the air, because when
this biomass grows, it absorbs CO2. If this is trapped during
incineration and bunkered away, it reduces the concentration of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We go CO2 negative. And we know that
we need to develop CO2 negative solutions in order to reach
the Paris agreement. So waste to energy business can be very
important in that matter. So, this is what the
future of getting CO2 out of the atmosphere
could look like. Joosten is in his favorite place -
the Karrendorf meadows. Here you can see how peatlands grow in their
natural, wet state. They don't release CO2, but instead absorb it. And
yet they can still be used for agriculture - by growing reeds.
A lot can be made out of these reeds:
roofs, plastics, biogas. Reeds are an example
of a plant that can be harvested sustainably
without damaging the bog. There are already many ideas about
what can be cultivated in bogs. In Hankhausen in western Germany,
large areas of moss are being cultivated for the first time on a
rewetted bog. After all, mosses are the natural vegetation
on peat bogs. Can they be grown and harvested
like any other field crop? The search for the best mosses for
agricultural cultivation is underway on the edge of the trial area. Anja
Prager and her team grow mosses from all over the world here.
They aim to find the ones that grow as well and as quickly as
possible. In this way they also absorb CO2 and turn the bogs
into sinks for greenhouse gases. However, it will take more for mosses
to become a profitable product. Direct payments, supports and
subsidies for farmers are not yet established.
It’s all a very new idea. We hope that we
can show, here on the demonstration farm, that this is
actually feasible as well as what we can harvest. Large-scale
implementation really depends on political will, on further
technological development - and on our finding the supermoss. Moss for what? As a replacement for
white peat. Peat was once made from moss and horticulture needs huge
amounts of it. So much that Germany’s drained bogs are not enough
and most of the peat is imported from the Baltic states. In
about 15 years the German peat will be completely exploited. Then
an alternative will have to be found. Mosses as a
peat substitute would be a double benefit
for the climate: No more emissions from peat extraction
and the mosses bind CO2 from the air. All methods of binding
CO2 must be researched - without prejudice.
Time is running out.