The world’s first commercial carbon storage project off Norway’s coast has successfully completed its maiden CO2 injection beneath the North Sea seabed, the Northern Lights consortium announced on Monday.
The venture, driven by energy giants Equinor, Shell, and TotalEnergies, is designed to capture carbon emissions from industrial smokestacks across Europe, transport them, and permanently store them underground, keeping them out of the atmosphere and helping curb climate change.
“We now injected and stored the very first CO2 safely in the reservoir,” Northern Lights’ managing director Tim Heijn confirmed in a statement. “Our ships, facilities and wells are now in operation.”
The process involves capturing emissions, converting them into liquid form, and shipping them to the Oygarden terminal near Bergen, on Norway’s western coast.
From there, the CO2 is transferred to massive storage tanks before being injected through a 110-kilometre (68-mile) pipeline into a reservoir located 2.6 kilometres below the seabed, ensuring permanent storage.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency recognize carbon capture and storage as an essential technology, particularly for heavy industries like cement and steel, which face greater challenges in cutting emissions.
The first batch of CO2 stored in the Northern Lights reservoir originated from Heidelberg Materials’ cement plant in Brevik, southeastern Norway.
Despite its promise, CCS remains an expensive and technically demanding solution. For many industries, buying “pollution permits” through the European carbon market is still cheaper than investing in carbon capture and storage.
So far, Northern Lights has secured three commercial contracts across Europe: with a Yara ammonia plant in the Netherlands, two of Orsted’s biofuel facilities in Denmark, and a Stockholm Exergi thermal power plant in Sweden.
Backed primarily by Norwegian state funding, the project currently holds the capacity to store 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 annually, with plans to expand storage to five million tonnes per year by 2030.
