HeidelbergCement and Equinor concludes Memorandum of Understanding ahead of carbon capture and storage
Dr Bernd Scheifele, CEO of the building materials company HeidelbergCement, which includes Cementa, signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Thursday with the state-owned Norwegian oil company Equinor, concerning development of carbon capture and storage (CCS) in Norway.
Equinor, Arne Reidar Mortensen
Since 2011, the project dealing with carbon dioxide capture and storage in the cement industry has been run at the HeidelbergCement subsidiary Norcem in Brevik through both pilot and demonstration plants, with good results.
The agreement that was signed in Oslo during an international high-level conference on CCS takes forward the experience made at the Brevik plant.
The agreement involves looking at the opportunities to capture carbon from other plants within HeidelbergCement for storage in the Norwegian continental shelf. The work will also focus on optimising the transport chain and striving to make it possible to implement CCS as a solution more widely in Europe. In addition the parties will collaborate in more areas which can help accelerating the process of CCS.
Next step to realise a full-scale solution
“We’ve shown that it’s possible to capture carbon dioxide in Brevik, and the project is the most technically mature in terms in the global cement industry. By upscaling this work, we’ll become a pioneer and create experiences that can be passed on to more factories, says Karin Comstedt Webb, Sustainability Manager HeidelbergCement Northern Europe and responsible for sustainability within Cementa.
“A full-scale value chain also provides an infrastructure for geological storage, which is important for also being able to take care of carbon dioxide emissions from other industrial plants”.
For Cementa, this means being one step closer to the necessary development stage that a CCS solution represents for the cement industry.
“If we have the opportunity to implement this, we’ll have the very first CCS-facility in the cement industry in place in Norway in 2024, with an opportunity to work towards a solution in Sweden by 2030,” says Karin Comstedt Webb.
For more information, please contact:
Karin Comstedt Webb, Sustainability Manager HeidelbergCement Northern Europe, karin.comstedt.webb@heidelbergcement.com, tel. +46 70-8649907.