By Romel S. Gurky
TotalEnergies, Equinor, and Shell have successfully transported and injected the first volumes of CO2 into the Northern Lights storage facilities, marking a major milestone in Europe’s carbon capture and storage (CCS) industry.
The CO2 was sourced from Heidelberg Materials’ cement factory in Brevik, Norway, and was transported by vessel to Northern Lights’ offshore storage facilities in Øygarden, 100 km off the coast of Western Norway. The CO2 was then injected 2,600 meters below the seabed, into the world’s first merchant CO2 transportation and storage project.
The first phase of Northern Lights has a storage capacity of 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year, which has already been fully booked by industrial customers from Norway and continental Europe. The second phase of the project, which will increase capacity to more than 5 million tonnes per year by 2028, received its Final Investment Decision in March 2025.
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“This marks the start of a new phase for the CCS industry in Europe, moving from concept to reality,” said Arnaud Le Foll, Senior Vice President of New Business at TotalEnergies in a statement released on Monday. “Northern Lights provides a tangible solution for hard-to-abate sectors to reduce CO2 emissions.”
The Northern Lights project, co-owned by TotalEnergies, Equinor, and Shell, is designed to offer CO2 transport and storage services, enabling the mitigation of industrial emissions that cannot be avoided through other means. The project has already secured five industrial customers, including Hafslund Celsio and Heidelberg Materials in Norway, Yara in the Netherlands, Ørsted in Denmark, and Stockholm Exergi in Sweden.
Editing by Alexander Ginting
