NEWS

Europe’s top oil producer has backed a project aiming to capture carbon dioxide from European factories and bury it beneath the North Sea.

A company backed by fossil fuel giants and the Norwegian government has built the world’s first carbon shipping port here, with the aim of creating a dumping ground for Europe’s planet-warming pollution.

The effort involves capturing carbon dioxide from industrial smokestacks and loading it onto ships, which will carry it here, to be buried in a layer of spongy rock a mile and a half beneath the seabed.

Storing CO2 this way isn’t new. A Norwegian oil and gas company has been doing it for nearly 30 years, separating carbon from the gas it extracts in the North Sea and sending it down a pipeline to a stretch of sandstone known as the Utsira Formation.

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