Norway facility experiments with carbon capture

Economist : Norway has opened the largest and newest experimental facility to date for carbon capture and storage (CCS). According to a 2012 report from the International Energy Agency, “CCS technology is of fundamental importance in the effort to reduce global emissions and avert dangerous effects of climate change.” Unfortunately, CCS has proven to be quite expensiveâmdash;ironically because it requires a lot of power that would not otherwise have had to be generated. As a result, although many projects were proposed in the late 2000s, several have since been cancelled. The new facility at Mongstad, a billion-dollar development owned jointly by the Norwegian government and three oil companies, consists of two carbon dioxide capture plants with more than 4000 instruments to monitor the process. Its operators will experiment with different flow rates, carbon dioxide concentrations, and the capture technology itself in order to improve the process and minimize the cost.