on the Sleipner gas platform in the North Sea.

It pumps millions of tons of carbon dioxide under the sea bed:

The greenhouse gas that threatens to

warm the planet is simply bunkered away.

And Equinor has plans to sequester even more carbon dioxide.

The storage potential in the North Sea is large enough to handle a

substantial part if not everything that comes out of Europe.

Can that work? Will ships with CO2 soon be going to Norway

to sink our climate problem under the North Sea?

The technologies exist, but do they really advance

climate protection or are we just buying time?

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on

Climate Change, we can only emit a maximum

of around 330 billion tons of CO2 if the rise in global temperature is to

stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius. We are currently releasing

around 42 billion tons a year. If we carry on as before, the CO2 budget

would be used up in around 8 years, by 2028.

Steps like closing coal-fired power plants,

expanding the use of renewable energies

and switching to electric cars will cause CO2 emissions to decrease.

The more ambitious we are, the more they go down. But keeping the

increase below 330 billion tons seems a hopeless cause.

And it means there'll be more CO2 that has to be removed from the air.

We need reforestation. We have to think about how to deal

with our bogs, but that won't be enough.

Even if we cut our CO2 emissions in half

every decade, we will still have to remove

several hundred million tons of CO2

from the atmosphere by the end of the century.

So, we have to ask ourselves where we can put it.

Norway has a lot of experience removing and storing CO2.

Equinor extracts natural gas on a peninsula near

Hammerfest, the northernmost city in Europe.

Andreas Sandvik is in charge of the plant. He is proud that a way has

been found here to get rid of CO2, but also to deliver

an immense amount of fossil energy to Europe.

It is amazing. It's a lot of energy.

Typically energy for a city of 60,000 inhabitants

for a whole year that's about 1.2 gigawatts. So it's amazing.

CO2 is always a by-product of natural gas extraction. But the crucial thing

here is that it flows back under the North Sea. The system is

controlled remotely from the command center. There is no offshore platform.

One pipeline brings natural gas to the plant,

while another carries CO2 back under the sea.

In this, the gas stream coming in, about 6%

of the content is CO2. And this is quite

unique about this plant, because we remove the CO2, we dry it

and compress it and we push it back to a separate reservoir offshore

for permanent storage. 90 tons an hour, almost 800,000 tons

a year that we store permanently in this reservoir, offshore 143 kms out.

The state-owned company that made Norway

one of the richest countries on earth

would like to benefit from this experience. Equinor is in the process

of establishing a new business model — it calls the project Northern Lights.

As early as 2023, the first ships will bring

CO2 from European industry to Norway.

A new pipeline descends steeply from the coast, then runs 110 kilometers

along the sea floor, to a point where the greenhouse gases are

injected 2,500 meters deep into the North Sea sediment.

Sverre Overå is responsible for the new field of business.

It's his job to lead the company into the future.

Norway is seeing this as an opportunity here

to actually continue to use the resources

that are in the North Sea, not as an energy provider

but as a storage provider for industrial CO2.

Construction of the plants has started, and

the first test drilling has been done.

The gigantic Northern Lights project is meant to pave the way

for the large-scale storage of CO2. Its initial goal is to

free Europe's industries from greenhouse gases.

If we succeed then we have the opportunity to actually help

clean up quite a few of the industries that have no other option and we will

allow these industries actually to stay here in Europe. It's hard

to see a world without steel, it's hard to see a future without cement.

They are essential and they need to decarbonize as well.

Even if steel production switches to renewable energy sources, there will

always be an amount of CO2 left over from the manufacturing process.

Looking at German industry as a whole, this remaining CO2

accounts for around 7 percent of CO2 emissions. If Europe

is serious about climate protection, these emissions must also be stopped.

But is it realistic that freighters will bring CO2 from Germany to Norway?

Today there are only four ships like the Froya worldwide.

Tommy Pederson is responsible for loading the tanker.

In the Norwegian port of Porsgrunn, it takes on CO2 that

was released during the production of fertilizers.

The gas is delivered to the food industry, which uses it in

beer and fizzy drinks, for example, or for cooling.

Today, CO2 is a commodity in small quantities.

After the gas has been cooled and compressed,

the Froya transports it in liquid form.

The tank holds 1500 tons of CO2. Assuming that all of the

carbon dioxide produced by German industry would be transported by ships

like the Froya, around 100 of these tankers

would have to travel from Germany to Norway every day.

But that's not a problem for the specialist.

In theory it will be just a cost calculation,

how is the optimum size of the ship,

from around the North Sea down into the northern sea seabed.

I'm sure if this is a technology that those companies will chose,

they will calculate the right size of the ship.

So, shipping CO2 to Norway is plausible. But would those millions

of tons of greenhouse gases really stay put under the ocean floor?

This is the Kieshof Mire near Greifswald in eastern Germany.

Prof. Hans Joosten has many objections to the idea of sinking our greenhouse

gases using technical processes. He believes our priority should

be to restore natural CO2 stores, such as bogs.

We have to get away from the illusion that we can do business as usual

and develop a technology that compensates for all our sins.

Joosten is Dutch. He has researched bogs all over the world, works on the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and is called "the peat pope“.

Here Joosten tries to understand the origin and development

of bogs in the meter-thick layers of peat.

These are actually my favorite peat to taste. These water peat mosses.

They taste very fine, often sulfurous. Sulfide-like. And of course

we have to use all of our senses to better understand nature.

We always think that we need a lot of devices to measure things,

but we shouldn't forget that we can do an incredible amount

with our eyes and ears, our noses and our mouths.

There are hardly any idyllic places like this left in Germany: 99% of bogs

have been drained and thus destroyed. This has made

them climate killers - because all the peat that a bog like this stores

is then gradually released into the atmosphere.

That's pure stored carbon. Half of this plant matter consists of carbon

and that is stored away. It then grows up layer by layer. With us in

in the order of 1/2 mm to 1 mm per year. Over thousands of years these

layers are meters thick and contain a great deal

of carbon. That is pure climate protection.

This only applies to intact bogs. Since almost all bogs in Germany have

been drained, they give off a lot of greenhouse gases -

almost 6% of total emissions. More than air traffic.

We calculated that if we restore water to drained bogs, we will be able to

compensate for even more than the warming caused by CO2

emissions since the industrial revolution. So bog re-wetting

is a very important step — along with creating cooling systems

for a world that is getting warmer anyway.

That would be desirable. But how would it be

possible to restore bogs to their natural

state in an industrialized country like Germany?

The largest oil and gas deposits in the North Sea are here, off the coast

of Stavanger in Norway. The plans would mean pumping would

continue here, but in the opposite direction,

after those deposits are eventually

exhausted. But would the CO2 from European industry really stay

underground or would it become a time bomb?

I think we can use the example that oil

and gas is in the ground and it stays

there until we try to take it out. And

what we doing essentially is the reverse.

We're placing CO2 in the ground.

The headquarters of the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate

is also here in Stavanger. It makes decisions on the resources under

the North Sea, issues drilling licenses and inspects rock formations.

Fridtijov Riis is a geologist who has long been searching in the drill

core archive for the optimum sediment into

which the first industrial carbon dioxide will be injected.

We have been looking at possible storage options for many years.

I think I started with this in 2006. And one of the first suggestions

from our side was this Johanson formation because it's one

of the good sandstones. I can touch it, feel it,

I feel this is sand with a lot of pore space between the grains.

Under the North Sea, the pores of the sandstone

are filled with water. Most of the injected

CO2 dissolves in it — turning it into sparkling water.

The bigger the pores, the easier the gas can spread.

You can test it with your own, just blowing it and see if you can get

some air through it.

This is quite good.

I don't need to get too much force on my blow to get the air through.

The Johanson Formation, which is intended to absorb the CO2,

lies below the Troll Field: a gas deposit that contains another

30 years' supply of the fossil fuel. In between

are several layers of dense shale rock.

The Base of the Johanson formation is this red, somewhere in this area.

Because of the gas production from the Troll field, the

pressure is falling in these more shallow reservoirs, that means

even if there should be a little bit of leakage of CO2 from this one,

it cannot escape from the under pressure in the overlaying sands.

So far everything has been going well with the storage of CO2 in Norway.

At the Sleipner gas drilling platform, more than 1 million tons of CO2

have been pumped back underground every year for 25 years.

The Northern Lights project aims to start with 1.5 million tons per year.

If you look at the sheer magnitude of the problem globally there is a

need for thousands of facilities and we're talking hundreds of

millions of tons per year. That needs to be handled.

Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, has also been researched in Germany.

A 2017 experiment was a success. The CO2 remained

in the ground under Ketzin, in eastern Germany, but it raised fears

of earthquakes and escaping gases. Since then, the storage

of CO2 has been politically dead in Germany.

Even research is essentially prohibited.

In Ketzin, where I was also deeply involved in the safety concept,

I would have gladly built a house close to the storage facility at any

time without any worries. I would have been worried if I'd

put it in the wrong place in the wrong way with the wrong partner.

For Frank Schilling it is clear that countries like Germany that emit a lot

of CO2 also have to take responsibility

for it. He says CCS is indispensable.

There are estimates that in Europe we have enough storage space for

1000 years for our CO2 emissions. At the moment we have CCS as

a good alternative. If someone has a better one in 30 years,

all the better. But right now we have to improve the technology

so that it is safe and also controlled safely.

Hans Joosten's top priority when it comes to climate protection is to

return the bogs to their natural state and thus stop their CO2 emissions.

Here in the Recknitz region near Rostock on the eastern German coast he

is researching how a re-wetted bog can

become a CO2 store again in the long term.

The Tribsee Bog was drained over the centuries. This allowed oxygen

to penetrate the bog soil and break it down. That released

a lot of carbon. It was re-flooded 20 years ago.

During the period it was without water, it was a system in decline.

We have calculated that we lost 2.7 meters of

peat at this location over the last few decades.