Mona Mølnvik, Director of NCCS and Research Director at SINTEF, has been named the OG21 Technology Champion 2024 in recognition of her influential work for the development and implementation of carbon capture, transport, and storage (CCS). The award was given to Mona Mølnvik at the OG21 Forum in Oslo.
“I am deeply honoured and humbled. For me, I am accepting this award on behalf of the entire SINTEF organisation, our strategic partner NTNU, other academic institutions, and, not least, the industry,” Mølnvik said. “I would also like to extend a heartfelt thank you to the Norwegian Research Council and the Ministry of Energy for their many decades of support in building the knowledge base and technology for CCS.”
CCS for the 21st century
“We have not yet reached our goals in CCS. Today, 50 million tonnes of CO₂ are stored globally each year, but that’s still far too little. The CO₂ emissions from exported Norwegian oil and gas alone total 500 million tonnes annually,” Mølnvik highlighted in her acceptance speech.
“There is still a long way to go before CCS is firmly established as the tool to combat global climate change. This award is a powerful source of motivation and inspiration for me and my colleagues here in Trondheim and across Norway and the world, who work tirelessly every day to make CCS the solution the world needs.”
The OG21 Technology Champion is awarded annually by OG21 – one of Norway’s national strategies for the 21st century – to honour passionate inviduals who have been instrumental for new technologies for the Norwegian continental shelf.
In her nomination, Mona Mølnvik was described as an enthusiastic and generous advocate for CCS, championing its progress both in Norway and internationally over the past decades. Numerous milestones have been achieved for CCS in that time, yet Mona remains unwavering in her focus on the ultimate goal and the need for continuous advancement. For example, Longship was suggested in the application for NCCS and launched during its run. The project was a major leap forward for Norway and global CCS efforts, yet Mona consistently reminds us that we will need thousands more Longships to meet our climate goals – an outlook that pushes the entire research field forward.
Mona’s vision for advancing CCS is firmly rooted in collaboration between research institutions and industry. The success of this approach is evident in the substantial impact of the FMEs BigCCS (2009–2016) and NCCS (2017–2024), the world’s largest research projects on CCS. The trust built through these FMEs has paved the way for their successor, GigaCCS, which Mona will also lead when it launches on January 1st, 2025.
Previously, Mona has won the coveted Green Award – which is sometimes referred to as the Olympic gold medal in CCS – and she was chosen as one of Norway’s top 50 women in tech in 2022.
