The Snøhvit project is the first petroleum production plant in the Barents Sea. At the onshore LNG plant off Hammerfest in northern Norway, carbon dioxide is captured from the production stream in subsea wells in the Barents Sea, 145 kilometres off the onshore facilities at Melkøya. At full production, the plant has a capture and storage capacity of 700,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year. This is equivalent to the annual emission of approximately 330,000 cars (average emission of 160 g CO1 per kilometre and annual driving distance of 15,000 kilometres).

The subsea wells are located at ocean depths between 250 and 350 metres, and gas streams through a multiphase pipeline to the onshore production plant. No part of the offshore plant is visible from the surface and it is designed to prevent any hindrance to fishing activities in the area. The site is not yet fully developed, but it will produce from nine wells in the Snøhvit and Albatross reservoirs when the first phase is completed in 2011. The Askeladd reservoir will also enter production in 2014 or 2015.

The produced gas contains between 5% and 8% CO2 which must be reduced to less than 50 parts per million CO2 to prevent freeze-out during the LNG cooling process. Permitted chemicals are introduced to the gas at high pressure, binding the CO2. The CO2 is then boiled off the mixture and liquefied before being pumped through a dedicated pipeline back to an empty subsea reservoir beneath Snøhvit. Monitoring of the development in the reservoir is carried out using 4D-seismic technology, and no leakage has been detected.

The regularity of the CO2 injection operation is expected to be 95% of production time.