Northern Lights injects first carbon dioxide for storage

After several years of development and public investment, the Northern Lights carbon dioxide sequestration project has injected its first load of waste CO₂ for permanent storage 2,600 m below the seafloor off the coast of Norway. The facility is a joint venture between the European energy firms Equinor, TotalEnergies, and Shell and is operated by Equinor.

The CO₂ was captured at a cement factory in Norway owned by Heidelberg Materials. The firms have not disclosed how much CO₂ was in the first load, but the marine vessels that Northern Lights uses can carry up to 7,500 m³ of liquid CO₂, which equates to roughly 8,000 metric tons (t).

Currently, Northern Lights has an annual intake capacity of 1.5 million t. In March, the partners made a final investment decision on a $700 million plan to expand that capacity to 5 million t.

For the rest of the year, the facility will inject CO₂ from Heidelberg and from a waste-to-energy plant that provides district heating to Oslo, Norway. In 2026, the partners will start picking up the greenhouse gas from the energy firm Ørsted’s biomass-burning power plants in Denmark and a Yara ammonia plant in the Netherlands. Northern Lights also has a contract to take CO₂ from biomass-fueled power plants in Sweden starting in 2028.

Cement is a good place to start because of the industry’s scale and climate impact, says Patrice Lahlum, vice president for industrial innovation and carbon management at the energy nonprofit Great Plains Institute. “Cement and concrete, the world’s second-most used material after water, account for about 8% of global emissions. For the first time, we are seeing large-scale carbon dioxide storage infrastructure enable the production of zero-carbon cement,” she says.

Andrew Reid, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a nonprofit think tank, says Northern Lights won’t change the middling success rate of carbon sequestration projects until it proves itself over time and much larger volumes. “This project is heavily subsidized at over 80% of capex and opex costs [capital expenditure and operating expenses], so for the project sponsors, initiating and developing the storage site has thus far been relatively low risk,” Reid says. “We have seen in other projects that, over time, the proposed values have not been achieved for a number of technical reasons. Only time will tell how successful, or otherwise, this storage site will be.”

The start-up of Northern Lights is a milestone for industrial decarbonization despite the public subsidies required to bring it online, according to Simon Roussanaly, a research scientist at Sintef Energy Research, an independent research organization in Norway. Along the way, the project has found and addressed a litany of technical and business-model challenges, work that will smooth the path for every subsequent CO₂ capture and storage (CCS) project.

“To come to life, these first-of-a-kind projects require significant national or international public financial support to compensate for their associated higher cost,” Roussanaly says. “The good news is that these costs will go down as the technology is further deployed and scaled up and reach a point where the cost of CCS can be carried by end users.”