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New Energy World™
New Energy World™ embraces the whole energy industry as it connects and converges to address the decarbonisation challenge. It covers progress being made across the industry, from the dynamics under way to reduce emissions in oil and gas, through improvements to the efficiency of energy conversion and use, to cutting-edge initiatives in renewable and low-carbon technologies.
First carbon dioxide delivered to pioneering ‘merchant storage’ undersea facility in Norway
2/9/2025
News
TotalEnergies and its partners, Equinor and Shell, have announced that the first volumes of CO2 were successfully transported by vessel from Heidelberg Materials’ cement factory in Brevik, Norway, to Northern Lights’ facilities on the island of Øygarden. They were then injected 2.6 km below the seabed into the storage facilities, 100 km off the coast of western Norway.
Northern Lights is said to be the world’s first ‘merchant’ CO2 transportation and storage project. The first phase has a storage capacity of 1.5mn t/y of CO2, which has been fully booked by customers from Norway and Continental Europe, says TotalEnergies. A final investment decision for the second phase was announced in March – this will increase the project capacity to more than 5mn t/y of CO2 from 2028.
The development of CO2 transport and storage services is one of the necessary levers for reducing emissions for European industry. Northern Lights says it has developed a strong customer base, with five industrial customers already: waste-to-energy plant Hafslund Celsio and cement plant Heidelberg Materials in Norway, Yara ammonia production plant in the Netherlands, Ørsted biomass power plant in Denmark and Stockholm Exergi biomass power plant in Sweden.
The opening of the Northern Lights project represents a significant step into implementation of carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects for industrial customers in Europe.
‘With the start of operations of Northern Lights, we are entering a new phase for the CCS industry in Europe. This industry now moves to reality, offering hard-to-abate sectors a credible and tangible way to reduce CO2 emissions’, said Arnaud Le Foll, Senior Vice-President New Business – Carbon Neutrality, TotalEnergies.
Delivering CO2 transport and storage as a service, Northern Lights will enable mitigation of industrial emissions that cannot be avoided and will accelerate the decarbonisation of European industry, says TotalEnergies. The project draws on experience from over 25 years of CO2 storage on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. The company will transport liquefied CO2 from capture sites to an onshore receiving terminal in western Norway, before transporting it by pipeline for permanent storage in a reservoir under the seabed.
TotalEnergies says it is on track to enable significant decarbonisation of European industrial businesses through projects such as Northern Lights in Norway, NEP in the UK, Bayou-Bend in the US, Aramis in the Netherlands and Bifrost in Denmark.
See also feature article this week: ‘Solid, gas and liquid: how carbon capture in cement production is becoming a concrete idea’.
