The community of Longyearbyen offers great advantages as a test site for carbon capture and storage, which can be turned into equally great business opportunities:
- The town of Longyearbyen with its population of 2000 is a pilot size community.
- Longyearbyen has a closed energy system. It is not linked to the energy system of mainland Norway.
- The main source of energy in Longyearbyen is coal. The nearest coal mine is 12 km to the east of town.
- Svalbard has Norway’s only coal fuelled power plants. The 10 MW power plant of Longyearbyen also delivers heating to the town buildings.
- Svalbard has geological structures that can be utilized for subsurface deposition of CO2. They are on land and accessible by road, only 5 km from Longyearbyen.
Add to this the fact that Svalbard has a green profile that is widely recognized internationally. According to its environmental laws, Svalbard shall be one of the best preserved wildernesses in the world. At the same time, Svalbard – with its High Arctic location – is an early warning region for climate change. As a consequence of both characteristics, the archipelago has high visibility and is well suited as a showroom for environmental friendly policies and technologies.
The incentive, or motivation, for the Longyearbyen CO2 lab project is the global need for CO2 injection test sites to test storability and methods and risks of subsurface storage. Svalbard’s environmental standing and global attention – with numerous high profile visitors every year – substantiate the ambition to become a globally recognized “green” show-case.
The project is planned over a ten year period, starting in 2007 and ending in 2017. Such a lengthy activity is proposed in order to establish the required infrastructure (2007-2012) and produce time-series datasets (2012-2017) which is fundamental to the research and monitoring activities. The project may be extended.
UNIS seeks both technological and financial partners for the Longyearbyen CO2 lab.
The lab has the full support of the local community council. |
