The Norwegian fertilizer giant Yara inaugurated Europe’s largest CO2 capture plant on Monday in Sluiskil (the Netherlands), near the Belgian border.
The aim is to capture up to 800,000 tons of CO2 from its ammonia production every year, or about 0.5 percent of the Netherlands’ total annual emissions, and store it permanently.
The plant completes the first industrial-scale cross-border value chain for capturing, transporting, and permanently storing CO2. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) aims to capture CO2 directly at the point of emission.
Operators then liquefy the CO2 and store it in seven tanks with about 15,000 tons of on-site capacity. Northern Lights ships will transport the captured CO2 twice a week to a Norwegian terminal.
2,600 meters below the seabed
According to a Northern Lights study, the logistical footprint is ‘only’ a few percent. The CO2 is then injected into a deep saltwater layer, 2,600 meters below the seabed. The IPCC concludes that with an appropriately selected and managed geological reservoir, captured CO₂ can be permanently isolated from the atmosphere.
Norway has decades of experience injecting CO₂ offshore at Sleipner and Snøhvit. The big uncertainty around CCS is therefore less “will every reservoir suddenly leak?” than cost, infrastructure, capture performance, and whether enough projects actually get built.
Yara becomes the first commercial customer of Northern Lights, a consortium comprising the oil companies Equinor, Shell, and TotalEnergies.
Solution for hard-to-decarbonize sectors
CCS technology is being put forward by the UN climate panel, the IPCC, as one of the solutions for hard-to-decarbonize sectors, such as the cement and steel industries. For now, however, the technology remains very expensive.
What makes Sluiskil significant is that it turns CCS in Europe from a collection of demonstrations into something much closer to an industrial, cross-border service business.
Sluiskil is almost literally in Belgium’s industrial backyard, in the same North Sea Port system as Ghent. It is effectively a preview of infrastructure that Belgian cement, chemical, refining and waste industries may also use.
More importantly, Belgium and Norway signed a bilateral agreement in March 2026 to enable CO₂ transport from Belgium to Norwegian storage.
The longer-term concept is a pipeline from Zeebrugge to Norway, developed by Fluxys and Equinor. Belgium needs foreign storage because it lacks meaningful domestic geological storage capacity.
Sluiskil is actually one of the easiest places in heavy industry to start CCS. The Sluiskil project represents a €194 to €200 million investment.
Ammonia
When natural gas is converted into hydrogen for ammonia production via steam methane reforming, CO₂ is released as a comparatively concentrated process stream. Separating CO₂ is already an inherent part of conventional ammonia manufacture.
Yara also stresses that ammonia factories have captured, liquefied, and handled CO₂ for decades for greenhouses, beverages, urea, and other applications. Its published scope for this €200 million project mainly covers liquefaction, storage, ship loading, and shore power.
Energy-intensive
However, capturing dilute CO₂ from cement kiln or steel mill flue gases is significantly more complicated and energy-intensive. That’s why the 400,000-ton Brevik cement project in Norway may actually be the more technically impressive capture achievement, even though Sluiskil is twice as large.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates energy-related and industrial-process CO₂ emissions reached 38.4 billion tons in 2025. Sluiskil’s 0.8 Mt is roughly 0.002% of annual global CO₂ emissions, or roughly one-fifty-thousandth of the problem. So, this plant will not noticeably slow global warming.
Drop in the global ocean
Still, the project is important because the Sluiskil plant alone accounts for about 1.6% of Europe’s 2030 50-Mt target. That’s actually substantial for one factory. But by the EU’s estimated 2040 requirement, its contribution falls to about 0.3%. That’s the scaling challenge.
The European Commission estimates that Europe needs to be ready to capture about 50 Mt/year by 2030, 280 Mt/year by 2040, and 450 Mt/year by 2050.
On its own, Sluiskil is a drop in the global ocean. But dismissing it for that reason is a little like dismissing the first 500-MW offshore wind farm because it represented a tiny fraction of global electricity. Its importance lies in whether the model scales from 0.8 Mt to tens and ultimately hundreds of millions of tonnes per year.
