The world’s first commercial offshore carbon storage service has begun operations off Norway’s coast, with its inaugural CO₂ injection into the North Sea seabed, the Northern Lights consortium announced on Monday.
Northern Lights, a partnership between Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies, transports and stores carbon dioxide captured from smokestacks across Europe in a bid to curb emissions linked to climate change.
“We have now injected and stored the very first CO₂ safely in the reservoir,” said Tim Heijn, managing director of Northern Lights. “Our ships, facilities and wells are now in operation.”
Captured CO₂ is liquefied and shipped to the Oygarden terminal near Bergen, then transferred into tanks before being pumped through a 110-kilometre pipeline and stored permanently 2.6 kilometres beneath the seabed.
The first injection came from Germany’s Heidelberg Materials cement plant in Brevik, southeastern Norway.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is considered by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) as a vital tool for industries like cement and steel, which are hard to decarbonise.
But the technology remains costly and complex. Without subsidies, industries often find it cheaper to buy “pollution permits” on the European carbon market than to invest in CCS.
Northern Lights has so far secured three commercial contracts in Europe: with Yara’s ammonia plant in the Netherlands, two of Orsted’s biofuel plants in Denmark, and Stockholm Exergi’s thermal power plant in Sweden.
Backed heavily by the Norwegian government, the project currently has capacity to store 1.5 million tonnes of CO₂ annually, with plans to expand to five million tonnes by 2030.
