Northern Lights, a Norwegian project for storing CO2 under the seabed, has stored its first quantities of carbon dioxide. The international consortium, involving energy companies Equinor, Shell, and TotalEnergies, is the world’s first commercial carbon dioxide (CO2) capture and storage service (CCS).
“We have reached an exciting milestone: We now injected and stored the very first CO₂ safely in the reservoir. Our ships, facilities, and wells are now in operation,” said Tim Heijn, Managing Director of Northern Lights JV, on Monday.
2,600 meters below the seabed
In 2020, the Norwegian government approved financing for the project to reduce CO2 emissions, particularly in sectors that rely on fossil fuels and are difficult to make sustainable.
The principle of CCS, which stands for Carbon Capture and Storage, involves capturing, transporting, and storing CO2 in subsoil or in depleted oil fields and gas reservoirs, and is one way to reduce CO2 emissions and achieve climate goals.
The captured CO2 comes from the Heidelberg cement factory in Brevik (Norway), is first liquefied, and then transported into the Aurora reservoir, 2,600 meters below the seabed of the Norwegian North Sea, via a 100-kilometer-long pipeline.
Annual storage of 5 million tons
Northern Lights will also transport and store CO2 from the Hafslund Celsio waste-to-energy plant in Oslo. The joint venture also has commercial agreements with a Yara ammonia plant in the Netherlands, two Ørsted biofuel plants in Denmark, and a Stockholm Exergi thermal power plant in Sweden.
Northern Lights has an annual storage capacity of 1.5 million tons of CO2, which is planned to be expanded to 5 million tons by the end of the decade.
CCS in other countries
Similar projects are seen in Denmark, for instance. Just over a year ago, off the coast of Denmark, the first foreign CO2—from Ineos in Zwijndrecht, near Antwerp—was injected into an undersea storage facility. That was part of the so-called Greensand Project, which involved 23 partners, including Belgian Fluxys and German oil and gas company Wintershall Dea.
And in Belgium, in 2024, engineers at ArcelorMittal launched a pilot plant in Ghent (Belgium) to capture CO2. The plant in Ghent is the first of its kind in the European steel industry. It is an essential step toward greening the polluting steel industry.
