Norway Delays A Major Carbon Capture and Storage Project

The Norwegian government has delayed until 2014 a highly touted project to capture and sequester carbon dioxide on a large scale, saying the project had become too complex to develop in the next several years. The project, to be located at Mongstad in western Norway and developed in conjunction with the oil firm Statoil, was designed to capture carbon on an industrial scale, proving that the technology could safely and effectively be used to sharply reduce carbon emissions from coal-burning power plants. The Norweigian Prime Minister, Jens Sotltenberg, had called the proposed Mongstad facility Norway’s “moonlanding” project. But the country’s oil minister said that an industrial-scale sequestration project was not feasible at this time and should be revived in four years. Some environmentalists harshly criticized the government’s decision, with one calling it a “scandal.”