Norwegian CCS Projects Reveal Persistent Geological Risks in Carbon Storage

New IEEFA research into Norway's Sleipner and Snohvit offshore carbon capture and storage projects — the two facilities most frequently cited as proof of the technology's viability — has uncovered significant and unpredictable deviations in subsurface carbon dioxide behaviour that placed containment at risk. The findings raise fundamental questions about whether the world possesses the technical capability, regulatory capacity, and multi-decade financial commitment required to keep CO2 permanently sequestered underground.

Sleipner has been injecting CO2 since 1996 and Snohvit since 2008. Between them, the two Norwegian fields store an average of 1.8 million metric tonnes of CO2 per year, with 22 million tonnes accumulated to date. Despite more than 150 academic papers and thousands of downloads of their seismic datasets, the fields have produced repeated surprises. At Sleipner, injected CO2 had already migrated to a previously unidentified shallow layer just three years into operations. At Snohvit, a storage site assessed as capable of holding 18 years of CO2 showed signs of failure within 18 months, threatening more than US$7 billion in field development and liquefaction infrastructure.

IEEFA notes that nearly 200 offshore CCS projects are now proposed globally, many of them ten or more times larger than Sleipner and Snohvit in terms of intended CO2 storage capacity. These proposals represent hundreds of billions of dollars in capital investment. Regulatory frameworks for CCS vary significantly — from 10-year post-closure bonding requirements in Australia to potentially 50 years in the United States — and most of the world has no CCS regulation at all, leaving communities and ecosystems exposed to long-term leakage risk.

The report concludes that every proposed CCS project carries site-specific geological risks that evolve over time, and that a high standard of ongoing monitoring and engineering response is a non-negotiable requirement — one that creates substantial and open-ended cost burdens. The findings are particularly relevant to Australia, which is planning several large-scale CCS schemes, and to India and other emerging markets evaluating CCS as part of their decarbonisation strategies. The authors argue that proponents routinely overstate the permanence and reliability of geological storage when presenting CCS to policymakers and investors.

Key figure — 22 million tonnes — cumulative CO2 stored by Sleipner and Snohvit combined since 1996