Øygarden is a crucial hub for Norway’s energy sector, particularly the Troll Gas Processing Plant at Kollsnes, which processes gas from the North Sea and supports European exports. It is also central to the Northern Lights Project, part of Norway’s carbon capture and storage (CCS) plan. Øygarden also plays a logistical role in offshore oil operations, supporting nearby fields like Troll and Oseberg.
The Northern Lights project is part of the Norwegian full-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) project.
The full-scale project will include capture of CO2 from one or two industrial capture sources. The Northern Lights project comprises transportation, receipt and permanent storage of CO2 in a reservoir in the northern North Sea.
Phase 1 includes capacity to transport, inject and store up to 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year. Once the CO2 is captured onshore, it will be transported by ship to the receiving terminal in Øygarden, pumped via pipeline to a subsea structure at the seabed and injected into a geological formation some 2,500 metres below the seabed in the North Sea for permanent storage.
The processing plant at Kollsnes in Øygarden west of Bergen processes gas from the Troll, Kvitebjørn, Visund and Fram fields. The plant can process up to 156 million standard cubic metres (MSm3) of natural gas per day.
The Kollsnes plant was opened in 1996 and plays an important role in exports of gas to Europe from the Norwegian continental shelf, with more than 40% of all Norwegian gas export going via this facility.
At Kollsnes, wet gas (NGL, natural gas liquids) is separated from the gas, and the resulting dry gas is compressed before large delivery compressors inject it into the pipeline systems which supply the gas to customers.
In 1999 it was decided to bring the gas from Kvitebjørn ashore at Kollsnes, and the gas from this field has a composition that makes it suitable for processing into higher-grade products.
Following this decision, a new plant was built to extract wet gas from the rich gas from Kvitebjørn. The new plant ushered in a new era at Kollsnes when it went into operation on 1 October 2004. Since October 2005, gas from the Visund field has also been brought ashore at Kollsnes. With a capacity of 26 million Sm3 of gas per day and considerable flexibility, the new NGL facility can also refine gas from future fields as they are developed.
The Vestprosess pipeline connects the facilities at Kollsnes to those at Mongstad, where wet gas from Kollsnes is fractioned into propane, butane and naphtha.
Owner: Gassled
Operator: Gassco
Technical operation: Equinor
The Sture terminal in the Municipality of Øygarden in Vestland is a major tanker port for crude oil.
Oseberg Transportation System (OTS) is a comprehensive system that started up in 1988 for transport of Oseberg crude oil to the Sture terminal for further handling and offloading into crude oil tankers.
Today the terminal receives crude oil and condensate via pipelines from the Oseberg area and from the Grane areas. Several fields are connected to Sture via the two pipelines, Oseberg Transport System and Grane Oil Pipeline. The terminal handles both stable and unstable crude oil. The unstable crude oil is stabilised to sales quality while the natural gas liquids (NGLs) are fractionated further and mainly piped to Vestprosess at Mongstad for further processing to propane and butane.
The plant has two jetty facilities which can accommodate oil tankers up to 320,000 dead weight tonnes (dwt), five crude oil caverns with a capacity of one million cubic metres, a 60,000 cubic metres LPG cavern and a 200,000 cubic metres ballast water cavern.
The crude oil sales qualities Oseberg Blend and Grane Blend are exported from the Sture terminal.
The sture terminal receives oil and condensate through the following pipelines:
Equinor Energy AS (operator) 36.24%
Petoro AS 48.38%
Total E&P Norge AS 12.98%
ConocoPhillips Skandinavia AS 2.40%
The Sture and Kollsnes plants are located in Øygarden, a rapidly developing area west of Bergen. Since their openings in 1988 and 1995, respectively, they have generated considerable value to society, both locally and nationally.
Whilst Sture has been an important oil infrastructure, Kollsnes processing plant handles signficant amounts of natural gas to European continent. Gassco is the operator of Kollsnes and Equinor is technical service provider.
Today, the area experiences the development of the world’s first open-source CO2 transport and storage infrastructure with the establishment of Northern Lights. Northern Lights is part of the Longship project (link) and is a joint venture between Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies. Longship reflects the Norwegian Government’s ambition to develop a full-scale CCS value chain in Norway. In the future Øygarden has been chosen as a possible location for CO2 transport and storage to Smeaheia.
With CO2 offset, Direct Air Capture and Direct Ocean capture are possibilities. Equinor and Captura are collaborating to develop industrial scale solutions to remove CO2 from the ocean. The initial pilot plant will be located at Kårstø gas processing facility offshore Norway. The captured CO2 is planned for the commissioning of the Northern Lights facilities.