Norway’s Equinor has awarded two key contracts in connection with the Northern Lights carbon transport and storage project worth a total of NOK 1.3 billion ($149.8 million).

Earlier this week, following a historic vote in parliament, the Norwegian Government announced its funding decision for the Northern Lights CO2 project.

The project will enable the shipping, reception, and sequestration of CO2 in geological strata in the Northern North Sea, approximately 2,600 meters below the seabed.

The first big contract for the project was awarded back in October for building site preparation and the construction of jetty facilities for the CO2 receiving terminal. The contract was awarded to Skanska.

Now, following the decision by the Norwegian government, Equinor has awarded further contracts for the project. 

Kværner has received a letter of award for the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract for the onshore plant facilities at Energiparken in Øygarden. 

The onshore plant will receive and store liquid CO2 before it is exported through a pump and pipeline system for injection offshore. The value of the contract is estimated at around NOK 1.05 billion ($121 million). 

The start-up of the work is planned in January 2021, and completion is planned by 1Q 2024. Kværner is a fully owned subsidiary of Aker Solutions.

Furthermore, Aker Solutions has been awarded an EPC contract for delivering a subsea injection system for the CO2 well in the North Sea. The contract is awarded as a call-off under the framework agreement signed with Equinor in 2017. 

The value of the contract is around NOK 250 million ($28.8 million). The work will start in January 2021 with installation and completion in 2023. The contract also includes options for equipment for future wells.

Northern Lights will be the first of its kind – an open and available infrastructure enabling transport of CO2 from industrial capture sites to a terminal in Øygarden for intermediate storage before being transported by pipeline for permanent storage in a reservoir 2600 meters under the seabed.

“These contracts are key to the success of the Northern Lights project. We look forward to working together with Aker Solutions and Kværner to deliver on our part of the solution to reduce industrial emissions”, says project director for Northern Lights Sverre Overå.

The pre-fabrication for the onshore facilities will be done at Aker Solutions’ yard at Stord before site installation. The scope includes facilities at jetty for import of CO2 from ships, storage tanks for intermediate storage of CO2 and process systems.

“Equinor aims to become a net-zero energy company by 2050. This requires that we together with our suppliers develop new value chains and projects such as offshore wind, hydrogen and carbon capture and storage. These projects will enable the supply industry to build new competencies and will create important activity and spin-offs going forward”, said Peggy Krantz-Underland, Equinor’s chief procurement officer.

The Northern Lights project is the transport and storage part of Longship, the Norwegian Government’s full-scale carbon capture and storage project. Equinor is developing the project together with Shell and Total as equal partners.

The procurement process for the onshore plant facilities is being performed in accordance with the Public Procurement Act and the Public Procurement Regulations . 

Equinor noted that, in line with the requirements, all the bidders in the competition were yesterday informed of the award decision and there is a standstill period that expires on 5 January 2021 when the onshore plant facilities contract will be signed.

A nearly “zero emissions” building site in Oslo, using electric-powered machinery, could be a pioneer for greener construction as the world’s urban areas swell by the equivalent of a Dublin or Dallas, Texas, every week, city experts have said.

Plug-in diggers, saws for cutting stones and other electric-powered machinery have been used to create a pedestrian area in the center of the Norwegian capital — completed in time for Christmas.

The shift aims to help curb climate change, air pollution and noise, officials have said.

C40 Cities, a network of almost 100 of the world’s biggest cities working to slow climate change, called the diesel-ditching project by the left-wing municipality “groundbreaking and unprecedented worldwide.”

“Many cities are looking to Oslo to learn,” said Cassie Sutherland, program director for energy and buildings at C40 Cities in London.

Sitting in chill winter sunshine at the Oslo site, on a new wooden bench by a flower bed planted with purple heather, Oslo Agency for Urban Environment project leader Marianne Molmen said that the revamped street “has become really great.”

The area, lined with shops, cinemas and bars — many closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic — also has new bicycle parking racks and tree saplings. Fossil-fuel-powered vehicles have been banned in much of the area, which includes special chargers for electric-powered taxis.

The revamp project, which began last year, saved 35,000 liters of diesel fuel and 99 percent of greenhouse gas emissions compared with a conventional building site, Molmen said.

The project cost 64 million kroner (US$7.2 million), compared with an estimated 59 million kroner for a more traditional project, largely because electric-powered machines are scarce and cost more.

The “zero emissions” standard used was more stringent than a previous “fossil free” regulation in Oslo, which allowed the use of bio-diesel engines.

Norway generates almost all its electricity from hydropower.

Oslo leads the global “clean construction forum” for C40, whose members include big cities such as Beijing, New York, Tokyo, London and Paris.

In one C40 initiative last month, Oslo, Los Angeles, Mexico City and Budapest pledged to halve emissions from building sites by 2030.

The world’s construction industry accounts for more than 23 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, C40 said, so any cuts would help nations meet goals that they set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement to limit global warming.

Urban areas, especially in developing nations, are expanding at a breakneck pace.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 2,500 scientists from more than 130 nations, said in its most recent assessment in 2014 that more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas “and each week the global urban population increases by 1.3 million.”

That means adding urban areas the size of Islamabad, Harare, Dublin or Dallas, Texas, every week or so.

Priorities for green construction include upgrading existing buildings, rather than demolishing and rebuilding, improving designs and using better materials, such as recycled steel or low-emissions concrete, Sutherland said.

Oslo’s “zero emissions” policy seeks to cover all work within the perimeter of building sites, but a lack of specialized electric-powered machinery from suppliers means that the municipality sometimes grants exemptions and permits machines that are powered by fossil fuels.

For example, in its recent project, the municipality allowed a diesel-powered crane onto the site after failing to find an electric-powered one. The crane burned 16 liters of fuel. Also, asphalt was laid at the site by diesel-powered machines.

Among suppliers, Norwegian construction equipment maker Nasta refits excavators built by Hitachi with batteries, enabling them to operate for about four hours before losing power.

Norway, western Europe’s top oil exporter with a US$1 trillion sovereign wealth fund built on fossil-fuel wealth, paradoxically has some of the globe’s most progressive environmental policies.

For example, those have created the highest rate of electric vehicle (EV) ownership in the world. In the first 11 months of this year, 52 percent of all new vehicles sold in Norway were electric-powered, the Norwegian Road Federation said.

Oslo Vice Mayor Lan Marie Nguyen Berg of the Green Party said that cities can often be more ambitious than national governments because voters see the results of climate policies in their daily lives — more parks, cleaner air and cycling lanes.

Oslo was named Europe’s Green Capital for last year by the European Commission.

A problem is defining where the city’s authority ends and less-stringent national building codes — which allow fossil fuels — take over.

The city government only demands emission-free construction on sites that it controls, from roads to kindergardens.

“Four of five construction sites in Oslo are private or owned by the central government,” Berg said, adding that the city has written to the central government saying that it wants to demand that all construction sites in Oslo be zero-emission or fossil-free sites.

It has not yet received a reply.

Among other green changes in the city, the percentage of EVs passing toll points into Oslo has risen to 25 percent of all vehicles from 6 percent in 2015. Diesel vehicles pay a toll five times higher than EVs.

The municipality has built 55km of cycling roads since 2015, after only about 15km were added in the previous decade. More than 100 electric-powered buses operate in Oslo and the surrounding areas.

Those changes have stirred hostility from some vehicle drivers. A new single-issue party, campaigning to abolish road tolls, won nearly 6 percent of the vote in Oslo municipal elections last year.

Despite its greener policies, Oslo has fallen far short of a headline-grabbing goal in 2016 to halve the city’s greenhouse emissions by this year.

Under revised, less ambitious goals, Oslo estimates that emissions this year are to be 25 percent below 2009 levels, which were about 1.4 million tonnes.

A lack of government funding for carbon capture and storage — used to catch emissions and trap them permanently underground — at a municipal waste plant partly explains the shortfall, Berg said.

Revisions to historic emissions data have also played a role, she said.

“We will get there, but it will also be hard work,” Berg said, reaffirming a goal to cut emissions 95 percent by 2030, compared with levels in 2009.

(By Alister Doyle / Thomson Reuters Foundation, OSLO)

Norway has been voted as the best country in the world for quality of life according to United Nation’s latest Human Development Index (HDI) ranking.

Neither the UK or the US came in the top ten while Norway has remained in the top spot for several years.

The HDI ranks a country depending on its life expectancy, expected years of schooling, mean years of schooling as well as gross international income (GNI).

For Norway, its life expectancy is the highest of the 189 countries in the index, with an average of 82.4 years. Meanwhile, the UK’s was 81.3 years, and the US was 78.9.

A massive landslide just north of Oslo, Norway, on Wednesday left 10 people dead or unaccounted for, officials said.

The landslide wiped out more than a dozen buildings in Ask, the administrative center of Gjerdrum municipality about 15 miles northeast of Oslo.

Authorities fear that some victims may be trapped in buildings that collapsed in the slide.

Officials said the landslide, which happened before dawn Wednesday, was roughly 2,300 feet long and dozens of feet wide.

“Those who worked here last night were overwhelmed when they saw the scene after daylight appeared,” local operations manager Roger Pettersen said.

At least six people from Ask were hospitalized and hundreds more from the village were evacuated. Efforts to rescue others were partly stymied by the ongoing danger of the landslide.

“It hurts to see how the forces of nature have ravaged Gjerdrum,” Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg tweeted. “My thoughts go to all those affected by the landslide. Now it is important that the emergency services get their job done.”

About 300 people who were evacuated from Ask took shelter at a hotel in nearby Skjetten, its manager said.

Ask is home to some 5,000 people.

Norway’s king Harald said in a statement that the accident had “made a deep impression on me and my family.

“My thoughts are with everyone affected, the injured, those who lost their homes and are now living in fear and uncertainty of the full extent of the disaster,” he said.

The observations from 2019 show that the annual average CO2 concentration in the atmosphere that year was 411,9 parts per million (ppm) at Zeppelin in Svalbard. This is 2,6 ppm more than the year before.

At Birkenes in Agder, the concentration is 416,1 ppm, which is 0,9 ppm higher than the year before.

This is according to a report by NILU, the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, commissioned by the Norwegian Environment Agency.

Concentration of CO2 is increasing

“We have observed new CO2-records at Zeppelin every year since 2001”, says Cathrine Lund Myhre from NILU in a press release.

“As long as we keep emitting more CO2 than that which is stored, the concentration in the atmosphere will continue to increase”, she says.

If the world is to keep the temperature below the 2 degree limit, the concentration of CO2 needs to stabilize at a level below 400 ppm over time.

Increased concentration of methane

When it comes to methane, the annual average was measured to 1961,2 parts per billion (ppb) at Birkenes, and 1952,9 ppb at Zeppelin.

Compared to 2018-levels, this represents an increase at Zeppelin of 14,3 ppb, the highest annual increase ever registered. At Birkenes, the increase was also considerable, at 8,2 ppb.

According to Lund Myhre, the increase in the concetration of methane is still a mystery to the researchers.

“We don’t know for certain whether the increase is due to emissions of methane from human activity, or if it is because climate change has started processes in nature that release more methane into the atmosphere”, Lund Myhre says.

Plastic pollution is not being effectively addressed by the current international legal and policy framework. Expert Group request UN to consider new global agreement. 

In the beginning of November over 200 delegates from all over the world representing government, business and civil society met to discuss how to deal with the increasing amount of ocean plastic pollution. A large majority of experts expressed support for launching negotiations to establish a global agreement to prevent plastic pollution at the fifth UN Environment Assembly (UNEA).

– It is frightening to know that vast amounts of plastic is entering the ocean and the environment every day, and that the problem is only increasing. In the same way we are cooperating globally to reduce climate emissions through the Paris Agreement, we need a global agreement to accelerate actions to prevent plastic pollution, says Norwegian Minister of Climate and Environment, Sveinung Rotevatn.

After a Norwegian initiative, the third UN Environment Assembly established an Ad Hoc Open-Ended Expert Group to assess various response options that can effectively reduce ocean plastic pollution. The Expert Group has now identified a range of options and requests countries to seriously consider these at the fifth UN Environment Assembly. Norwegian Climate and Environment Minister Sveinung Rotevatn is currently the President of the UN Environment Assembly.

Waste of resources

Vast quantities of plastic waste makes it to the ocean every day. Estimates show that plastic production is set to double in the next 20 years. There is reason to expect that pollution levels will rise in parallel if stronger measures are not put in place quickly.   

The Expert Group agrees that existing efforts are not sufficient, and there is a urgent need for stronger measures throughout the life cycle of plastics at the national, regional and global level to stop ocean pollution.

– Plastic pollution is destroying our oceans and the environment, with detrimental effects to animal life and biological diversity. But this is not only a pollution problem, it is also a waste of resources. I believe a global agreement will lead to stronger measures being implemented by countries throughout the life cycle of plastic than otherwise would be the case, says Norwegian Climate and Environment Minister, Sveinung Rotevatn.

Digital meetings

On account of the pandemic, delegates were unable to meet face-to-face and the meeting was held virtually. At times, there were significant technical difficulties for several delegates throughout the meeting as the quality of internet connections varied across geographical regions.

– It is notable that the group was able to agree even under such difficult circumstances. Environmental problems do not go away just because there is a pandemic. We cannot afford to postpone every challenging conversation until we are back to normal, says Rotevatn.

Internationally there is growing support for establishing a global agreement to prevent plastic pollution. Around 110 countries are encompassed by political declarations of support for exploring this possibility. However, several major countries such as USA and China have not expressed support for a new agreement. 

One way to fight deforestation is to pay countries to keep their forests from being logged. Norway is leading the way for such programs and has announced it will double the price it pays – but the rate might still not be competitive enough in middle-income countries.

Norway is doubling the price it guarantees developing nations to keep their tropical forests standing, in a step to slow catastrophic losses and encourage big companies to invest far more in nature to combat climate change.

In exchange for boosting the floor price it offers nations to slow deforestation to $10 per metric ton of carbon dioxide from $5 – until now the international standard – countries must adopt better monitoring, said Per Fredrik Pharo, director of Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative.

Norway is the top donor for safeguarding rainforests, ahead of nations including Germany and Britain, and has spent up to $330 million a year since 2008.

But despite concentrated efforts to curb losses, tropical forests are being cleared at a rate of a soccer field every six seconds, and deforestation accounts for about 11% of man-made greenhouse gas emissions each year, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Trees naturally curb global warming by soaking up carbon dioxide from the air in order to grow, which makes protecting forests a cost-effective way to deal with climate threats.

United States President-elect Joe Biden called in September for the world to mobilize $20 billion to protect the Amazon.

That rainforest locks up an estimated 500 metric tons of carbon dioxide for every 2.5 acres – roughly the size of a soccer field.

At $10 a metric ton, tropical forest countries could earn $5,000 for every 2.5 acres of rainforest they conserve compared to a benchmark of historic rates of losses.

The move comes as major firms including Walmart, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Shell have set goals of net zero emissions in coming decades since almost 200 governments adopted the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

To achieve those goals, many – besides slashing their own emissions – will need to pay to offset what they cannot cut, through measures potentially including protecting forests.

Mr. Pharo said getting the payment system for forest protection running effectively had suffered from “a chicken and egg problem” up to now. But “serious companies are now entering the fray,” he said, with Norway “using our money to grease the wheels.”

On one side of the chicken-and-egg dilemma, developing nations have found it less profitable to safeguard rainforests – at least in the short term – than to allow logging or to permit farmers to burn down forests to produce soya, palm oil, or beef.

On the other side, donor nations and companies are wary of paying to protect forests when their investments may literally go up in smoke. Deforestation has risen in Brazil, for instance, since populist President Jair Bolsonaro took office in 2019.

To qualify for the $10 floor price, Mr. Pharo said tropical forest governments will have to adopt a rigorous accounting and monitoring system for forests, known as ART TREES, worked out in February.

“What we are saying to countries – like Gabon, Indonesia, Colombia – is that ‘You have our price guarantee. If you deliver [metric tons] under ART TREES, we will pay you $10 a [metric ton], up to some ceiling’,” he said.

The hope is that compliance tracked by satellites and on-the-ground inspections will make big companies confident enough to invest $10 per metric ton or more, allowing Norway to stand aside and act mostly as a back-up.

Norway, which is western Europe’s top oil and gas exporter, has also helped set up nonprofit group Emergent to act as a broker to promote forest investments by companies.

Still, it is unclear if the $10 floor price will be enough to unlock investments.

Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, a former Costa Rican environment minister who heads the Global Environment Facility in Washington, said the value of standing forest had to match what farmers in tropical nations could earn from “unsustainable cattle ranching or agriculture after the land is deforested” and reward “positive land uses.”

Safeguarding forests also offers benefits like protecting biodiversity and human well-being, he said. But the costs of managing and monitoring forests to limit deforestation is often “higher than $10” per metric ton of carbon dioxide.

“For least developed countries, [$10] may be attractive, but for middle-income countries and those with high forest cover, it may be very low,” he said.

Frances Seymour, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, a U.S. think-tank, and chair of ART TREES, said a contract signed by Norway and Gabon in September 2019 – the first for $10 a metric ton – was seen among forest experts as “a big step forward.”

“Private sector talk of $15 a [metric ton] has raised eyebrows even further [and is] more in the ballpark towards $20 that would actually be of interest,” she said.

She said the international focus needed to be on slowing losses of existing rainforests, rather than planting new trees. She predicted a Biden administration will increase U.S. engagement in protecting forests.

Anders Haug Larsen, of the Rainforest Foundation Norway, welcomed Norway’s plan but said $10 “was not enough by itself to make the carrot big enough” for many forest nations.

Among hard-to-value extra benefits, forests are vast stores of biodiversity, from orangutans to jaguars or rare orchids. About 25% of all pharmaceuticals have ingredients from plants.

But managing forests better also can have spinoffs such as eco-tourism and sustainable logging.

Mary Grady, director of ART in California, said she was in talks about taking part with about 25 developing countries or sub-national governments that have power to pass laws to safeguard forests.

By enlisting governments, ART TREES will try to avoid past problems where successful forest protection in one region merely displaced loggers and farmers elsewhere, with no net benefits for forests.

“The corporate buyers like to be able to point to a specific region, a community, an iconic species they are protecting,” Ms. Grady said.

“While that is great on the cover of the annual report, it’s not delivering a real climate benefit if you realize that the forest is being burned down in the next jurisdiction over,” she added.

Emergent’s executive director Eron Bloomgarden said he was in talks with a wide range of major companies, in oil and gas, finance, technology, and other sectors, with combined annual turnover of $2 trillion.

He declined to give a list of names, except Norwegian energy group Equinor, which has publicly said it will invest in forests once a “well-functioning market is in place”.

Mr. Bloomgarden said he hoped for a first round of big corporate announcements of investments by a United Nations climate summit next year in Glasgow, Scotland.

Constance McDermott, a researcher at the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University, said there were still many hurdles standing in the way of Norway’s programs.

Any certification system will struggle, for instance, to ensure indigenous peoples’ rights to land, something often disputed by governments in developing nations, she said.

She called the Norwegian initiative “an interesting idea. But it has a lot of challenges to address.”

This story was reported by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.