Something significant happened when the EU passed the Net Zero Industry Act (NZIA). For the first time, major fossil fuel producers are not merely invited to support carbon capture and storage (CCS). They may be legally required to help build it. For an industry that has long treated CCS as an optional investment, this is a genuine shift.
But it raises an important question: can legislation succeed where the market has not?
The obligation
Article 23 NZIA assigns individual storage contributions to large oil and gas producers in support of a target of at least 50 million tonnes of annual CO2 injection capacity in the EU by 2030.
In practice, this means that large fossil fuel companies are no longer merely encouraged to support CCS. Under Article 23 NZIA, they may be required to help develop storage capacity. In May 2025, the European Commission confirmed that it had identified 44 oil and gas companies for this purpose.
That is a significant shift. CCS has often been presented as something companies might invest in if the business case looked attractive. NZIA now moves beyond that rationale.
A polluter-pays logic, with practical problems
The political logic is easy to identify: companies that have profited from fossil fuel extraction are now required to contribute to the infrastructure needed to manage its consequences.
Still, the legal and practical reality is more complicated. Developing CO2 storage capacity is a slow and uncertain process. It depends on geological assessments, environmental review and large upfront investments. Even a serious company with financial resources and technical expertise cannot fully control the outcome. Storage sites may prove unsuitable. Permits may be delayed. Timelines may slip for reasons beyond the operator’s control. And beyond construction lies a harder problem: liability for stored CO₂ transfers to the state eventually, but when, and on what conditions, is not yet clear.
That uncertainty matters because NZIA is not merely aspirational. Article 23(13) requires Member States to introduce penalties for infringements of the storage obligation by 30 June 2026. The Clean Air Task Force has already highlighted how those penalties may become central to enforcement. In other words, companies could face legal exposure even where delivery may depend on permitting, geological conditions and other factors not fully within their control.
The result is a tension at the centre of the Act. It is already generating legal conflict. By late 2025, at least 15 annulment actions had been filed before the EU General Court by companies including ExxonMobil, Shell, TotalEnergies, Orlen and Romgaz. The objections go beyond legal technicalities: Romgaz, Romania's largest gas producer, argues that it was assigned a storage quota representing over 20 per cent of the EU target despite Romania producing only 3 per cent of EU industrial emissions. The company also argues that the obligation was imposed without any prior feasibility study. This suggests that Article 23 is not just a symbolic provision. It is becoming a live compliance and litigation issue.
A duty to build storage is not a duty to transition
Even if NZIA works as intended, it is important to be clear about what this obligation can and cannot achieve. The European Commission presents CCS as an important tool for decarbonising hard-to-abate sectors. That is persuasive up to a point. For cement, steel, chemicals, and some industrial processes, carbon storage may well be necessary.
Still, CCS has limits. Independent net-zero pathway assessments suggest that it can only address a limited share of total emissions. It cannot replace rapid emissions reduction but instead complements it where emissions are hardest to eliminate.
Why this matters for Norway
On 19 February 2026, the EFTA Court delivered its advisory opinion in Saga Subsea (Case E-6/25), finding that the EEA Agreement applies to petroleum activities on the Norwegian continental shelf. This directly contradicts Norway's longstanding position, most recently set out in the Norwegian government report NOU 2024:7 and defended before the EFTA Court itself, that activity on the continental shelf falls outside the EEA Agreement's geographical scope.
The EEA Joint Committee has not yet adopted a formal incorporation decision, and the government is still finding its footing. In September 2024, Norway had sent NZIA for public consultation, receiving 46 responses. The submissions, from industry, government agencies and civil society alike, were largely premised on the assumption that the shelf falls outside EEA jurisdiction. The EFTA Court has now rejected that assumption. The question is whether the government can build its final position on a consultation that addressed a legal reality that no longer exists.
The dilemma is real. Article 20(1) NZIA limits the 50 Mt injection capacity objective to storage sites located in the territory of the Union, its exclusive economic zones or on its continental shelf. Recital 41 makes the consequence explicit: Norwegian storage counts towards the target only once NZIA is incorporated into the EEA Agreement, at which point the target "will be adjusted accordingly." Without incorporation, Norwegian CO₂ storage simply does not count. With incorporation, Norwegian operators conducting petroleum activities on the continental shelf, previously considered outside EEA jurisdiction, could face Article 23 obligations for the first time.
At the Europautvalget meeting on 19 March 2026, Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide confirmed that NZIA is a government priority, but linked Norway's timeline to the pending Supreme Court ruling in Saga Subsea. Domestically, pressure is building from the other direction. Not everyone is willing to wait. Bellona has called for immediate incorporation, arguing in Altinget that delay risks losing investment to other countries.
Whether Article 23 binds Norwegian operators on the shelf is, for now, a question for the Norwegian Supreme Court.
A real step, still a limited one
NZIA matters because it ends the fiction that CCS is purely voluntary for parts of the fossil fuel industry. That is a genuine regulatory shift, and for Norwegian operators, the question of whether it applies at all may be decided by a Supreme Court ruling before the year is out.
But a mandate does not make a market. The technology works. What is missing is the commercial infrastructure to scale it: stable carbon pricing, clear rules for liability transfer, and a viable business case for long-term storage. Article 23 creates an obligation. It does not yet create the conditions for that obligation to be met.
