Equinor Forced To Abandon Claim Of Storing 1 Million Tons Of CO2/Year Offshore; Actual Total About 10% Of That

Equinor has retracted a claim that it stores about a million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually at its flagship carbon capture project after DeSmog obtained data showing the real figure was as little as a tenth of that amount. The Norwegian oil company scrubbed the estimate from its website in November, when presented with official figures showing that it captured 106,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) at its Sleipner carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility in 2023. Equinor has not captured 1 million tonnes of CO2 per year at the site since 2001, according to the data, provided by the Norwegian Environment Agency.

The company put the reason for the discrepancy between the official figures and its public-facing claim to be capturing “about 1 million” tonnes of CO2 a year down to a failure to update a “static” webpage. “We have now removed this error from our website and updated this section with the correct information,” Equinor spokesman Gisle Ledel Johannessen said via email.

Equinor has been capturing CO2 from a gas processing plant at the Sleipner gas field in the North Sea since 1996. The field has particularly high concentrations of CO2, which Equinor filters out during the gas purification process and then injects below the seabed. The project has been cited by carbon capture advocates, and Equinor itself, as evidence that the technology is reliable enough to help meet global climate goals, despite its long history of cost-overruns and failed targets.

EDIT

The amount of CO2 captured by Equinor’s two CCS projects is dwarfed by the emissions released by burning the oil and gas sold by the company. In 2023, Equinor recorded a total of 262 million tonnes of CO2 emissions — including the emissions produced by its operations, and the emissions from burning the oil and gas those operations extracted, according to company sustainability data. In contrast, the company captured and stored a total of about 0.8 million tonnes of CO2 at Sleipner and Snøhvit, more than 300 times less than the amount emitted into the atmosphere by burning its products. And even with a functioning carbon capture facility onsite, net CO2 emissions at Sleipner far exceeded the amount of the gas that was stored. The Sleipner offshore platform provides power to several nearby gas fields by burning gas in turbines — a process that released 658,000 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere in 2023, according to the company’s sustainability reporting. That’s more than six times the 106,000 tonnes of CO2 that Equinor captured and stored from gas processing at Sleipner that year.

EDIT

https://www.desmog.com/2025/01/14/exclusive-norways-equinor-forced-to-withdraw-key-carbon-capture-claim/