Norway’s oil fields to run on land-based green hydropower

Bloomberg

Norway is trying to make its dirtiest industry as clean as possible. The multi-billion-dollar plan will do little to reduce the nation’s overall climate impact.
The Nordic country will use land-based green hydropower to electrify dozens of offshore oil and gas platforms. That will help meet national climate targets, and so allow the lucrative industry to keep pumping fossil fuels for decades more. But most of the emissions from oil and gas come when it’s burned so the initiative will do little to rein in pollution globally.
The move, which is mostly funded by the taxpayer, shines a light on how some countries and companies are finding ways to meet their own climate goals without jeopardising their economic interests — and without benefiting the planet much either. Norwegians may buy more electric vehicles than conventional cars, but the country is a massive exporter of carbon.
“The oil industry is the biggest polluting sector, so if you want to cut emissions in Norway to meet the climate targets you will not get far without electrifying it,” said Kjetil Lund, head of the
Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate, which regulates the energy supply.
Norway’s oil and gas industry released 14 million tons of greenhouse gases from its facilities in 2019, according to Statistics Norway. That’s almost 28% of the country’s total, making the sector an obvious target in the nation’s quest to reduce its emissions by 40% by 2030.
It’s also something that’s costing oil and gas companies money right now. The cost of permits in Europe’s emissions trading program, which includes Norway’s oil and gas platforms, have surged more than 50% this year to a record, and analysts are forecasting big gains ahead. Norway plans to punish emitters further with a national tax.
Equinor won’t reach an intermediate target to cut its emissions by 40% by 2030 without connecting platforms to the power grid, said Henriette Undrum, senior vice president for the company’s New Energy
Solutions arm. The choice is between electrification and curbing oil and gas output substantially. Direct emissions from Norway’s oil and gas facilities are just a fraction of the sector’s true climate impact. The fossil fuels exported from Norway last year would emit about 450 million tons of carbon dioxide if burned, nine times the nation’s total emissions in 2019, according to Bloomberg calculations based on Ministry of Petroleum and Energy data.
Some of the largest oil and gas producers in Norway have come up with separate plans for addressing the carbon generated from burning the products they sell, so-called Scope 3 emissions.