NEWS

The International Energy Agency–the energy watchdog of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development–has said that CO2 capture and storage from power plants fired by oil, gas and coal will play a vital role in worldwide efforts to limit global warming, contributing to about 20% of required emissions reductions in 2050.

The Mongstad full-scale project was meant to capture CO2 from the nearby gas-fired power plant and refinery, and the government had estimated the planning to cost more than $500 million. The project is led by Statoil, but the government pays all the costs.

The project has been both challenging and costly, and the risks are now seen as too big to go through with it, the government said. “We must have a project we can stand for, so we can show that this [technology] is good,” Mr. Moe told the Wall Street Journal in an interview. “When our assessment is that Mongstad isn’t such a project, it’s the right thing to do what we are now doing, taking the consequences.”