The world’s first commercial-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) “graveyard” has opened in Norway as part of the Northern Lights project.
Currently, the project is jointly run by Equinor, Shell and Total Energies. It is particularly designed to capture carbon dioxide from industrial sites across Europe.
Afterwards, make it into the transportation and permanently store it underground to keep it out of the atmosphere.
The Northern Lights managing director Tim Heijin said in a statement, “We now injected and stored the very first CO2 safely in the reservoir.”
He further explained, “Our ships facilities and wells are now in operation.”
In specific terms, captured CO2 is cooled into liquid form and moved to a storage terminal in Oxygarden near Bergen. It is then transferred into large tanks before being injected through a 110-kilometres pipeline into the seabed, at a depth of around 2.6 kilometers for maintaining permanent storage.
The carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is listed by the UN and the International Energy Agency for mitigating emissions from sectors like cement and steel.
Meanwhile the initial CO2 will be loaded from the Heidelberg Materials plant in Brevik, Norway.
The CCS will remain costly due to its potential and various industries are often opting to buy carbon credits instead of paying for storage.
Northern Lights has signed three contracts in Europe including Netherlands, Denmark’s Orsted biofuel plants and Stockholm Exergi in Sweden.
The Northern Lights project has the initial capacity of retaining 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 by the Norwegian government and annually plans to increase it to five million tonnes by the end of the decade.