Exploring pathways to decarbonization
The week was packed with activities. There were lectures, visits to industrial sites, a trip to the town hall in ?ygarden, collaborative group work, presentations, and engaging lectures at the University of Bergen. The event concluded with a geopolitics simulation exercise, which was met with enthusiastic participation by the PhD students.
The summer school explored different areas of the green transition, including an economic understanding of the power market, industrial restructuring, just transitions, the role of the energy system in the decarbonization, utilization of CO2, and more. With industrial site visits to the Northern Lights CO2 storage facilities in ?ygarden and the control room of the offshore wind farm Hywind Tampen at Sandsli, there was emphasis on industrial decarbonization as a key part of the green shift.
—The Moonlanding at Mongstad is a success story
Rune Nilsen, the construction manager at Northern Lights spoke about the Northern Lights project phases. He argued that the Moonlanding at Mongstad was not a failure, as it is commonly referred to, but rather a success story. Because of this initiative, Norway still has the world's largest test arena for carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. This has been fundamental to the realization of the Longship project.
Northern Lights is responsible for developing and operating CO2 transport and storage facilities, open to third parties, as part of Longship, which is the Norwegian Government’s full-scale carbon capture and storage project. It is the first ever cross-border, open-source CO2 transport and storage infrastructure. Companies across Europe are given the opportunity to store their CO2 safely and permanently underground. Phase one of the project is completed, and Northern Lights is ready for operations with a storage capacity of up to 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year.
Longship includes capturing CO2 from industrial sources in the Oslofjord region (cement and waste-to-energy) and shipping liquid CO2 from these industrial capture sites to an onshore terminal on the Norwegian west coast (?ygarden). From there, the liquefied CO2 will be transported by pipeline to an offshore storage location subsea in the North Sea, for permanent storage. Northern Lights is responsible for the transport and storage components of the project.
Read more about the project here (external website).
Still, it has not been a straightforward process. He pointed to the chicken-and-the-egg paradox for developing climate-friendly technologies.
—It has been a slow start. It is not possible to do CCS without carbon credits. Ideally, carbon credits should become even more expensive as this would increase the demand for CCS.
The visit was a great backdrop to the following lecture, where Knut Einar Rosendahl, professor at the School of Economics and Business at NMBU, explained the pricing mechanisms for CO2.
Putting a price on emissions can make it profitable for firms to reduce emissions through CCS, or help give incentives to develop new climate-friendly technologies. But Rosendahl also raised the issue that putting a price on emissions in one region may lead to new dilemmas, such as carbon leakage.
Carbon leakage refers to a situation that may occur if, for reasons of costs related to climate policies, businesses were to transfer production to other countries with less emission constraints. A consequence that may hinder the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions globally.
This issue reflects many of the key teachings presented to (and by) the PhD students throughout the week. The PhD students experienced some of these dilemmas first-hand through an interactive game of geopolitics, called "Geovania".
The green energy transition has many trade-offs in decision-making, planning, and operation that may conflict with each other. That is why it is important to take an interdisciplinary approach to working with and solving these issues, something that the NorRen summer school strives to do.
—An intense week full of energy insights
Swantje Krupp, a PhD candidate from the Department of Ocean Operations and Civil Engineering at NTNU, was among the attendees.
—I'm very happy I attended the NorRen summer school. It is a very well-organised course. The schedule was a good mix of lectures and site visits. The lecture topics were adapted to the company visits and built on their content. All in all, it was an intense week with many new insights, during which I gained a good understanding of the energy system in general and its various aspects.
She especially enjoyed the lecture on the just transition and the game of geopolitics.
—I liked a lot the lecture about work and labour in a green economy from David Jordhus-Lier. An important aspect which comes often too short. At the end of the week, we played a game that demonstrated the complexity of energy and resources. We were all thrilled and would have liked to have had more time to play it!
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