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At the remote Energiparken industrial hub in Øygarden on Norway’s rugged west coast, under skies that can stay light for 18 hours a day and where orcas and sea eagles can be spotted, a revolution is underway. In August, Northern Lights, the world’s first cross-border commercial carbon transport and storage service, injected carbon dioxide (CO₂) collected from a cement factory 450 kilometres away into an aquifer beneath the North Sea for the first time.

Northern Lights is a key part of Longship, the Norwegian government’s flagship carbon capture and storage (CCS) initiative and Europe’s first end-to-end CCS project. “Northern Lights marks the beginning of a new era in industrial decarbonisation and sets an exciting precedent for open-access carbon storage in Europe,” says Aksel Plener, an Operations Manager seconded from Shell to Northen Lights JV, a company owned by Shell, Equinor, and TotalEnergies.

Most climate scientists recognise that the world needs CCS projects like Northern Lights if society is to achieve net-zero emissions. According to the International Energy Agency, CCS is especially important for cutting emissions from carbon-intensive heavy industries like cement and steel. For Shell, which is working to unlock the potential of CCS to help decarbonise its own operations as well as those of its customers, projects like Northern Lights play an important part in its strategy to deliver more value with less emissions.

So how does this pioneering project work?

Heidelberg Materials will capture around 400,000 tonnes of CO₂ every year from its cement factory in Brevik, two hours south of Oslo. That is around half the plant’s total emissions and equivalent to the CO₂ emissions per passenger for around 150,000 round-trip flights between Frankfurt and New York, according to Heidelberg Materials.

High above the factory floor, limestone is heated in a massive rotating steel kiln which reaches a blistering 1,450°C. This transforms the limestone and leaves behind clinker, which is used to make cement. Inside a 103-metre-tall absorber tower, a chemical called amine, which has a strong affinity for CO₂, is injected into the flue gas from the kiln. The CO₂ binds with the amine, and is separated as a gas, before being liquefied and pumped into storage tanks on the quayside ready for transport.

Shipping the CO₂

To transport the CO₂ to Øygarden, Shell engineers have led the design of two vessels, with more in development. Among the largest liquefied-carbon carriers in the world, they are each capable of transporting 7,500 cubic metres of CO₂ in a single voyage, enough to fill three Olympic-sized swimming pools. The 130-metre-long Northern Pathfinder and Northern Pioneer vessels dock at the cement factory to load captured CO₂ before making the 36-hour journey to the Northern Lights terminal.

The ships run mainly on liquefied natural gas (LNG) and use wind-assisted rotor sails – motorised spinning cylinders that harness wind power to help propel the ship forward. An air lubrication system makes the ships more efficient by releasing bubbles along the hulls, which reduces friction with the water. These features can reduce the carbon intensity of the vessels by about 34% compared with conventional ships.

Storing the CO₂

At the Northern Lights terminal, the liquefied CO₂ is transferred from the ships into a dozen tanks before being pumped through a 110-kilometre subsea pipeline that winds its way through a fjord and out into the North Sea. It is then safely stored in an aquifer that lies beneath 330 metres of seawater and 2,600 metres of seabed. “This deep geological formation acts as a natural vault, ensuring that the captured CO₂ remains locked away, with the stored CO₂ monitored in real-time,” says Heidi Fjellvang, Northern Lights’ System Engineering Manager.

As well as from Heidelberg Materials’ cement factory in Brevik, from 2026, the first phase of Northern Lights is expected to collect CO₂ from an ammonia plant in the Netherlands belonging to crop nutrition company Yara, and from biomass power plants operated by Danish renewable-energy company Ørsted. From 2029, Northern Lights is also expected to collect CO₂ from Hafslund Celsio’s waste-to-heat plant at Klemetsrud in Norway, according to Hafslund Celsio.  

Under phase two expansion plans expected to be completed in 2028, Northern Lights will scale up its own transport and storage capacity to at least 5 million tonnes of CO₂ annually – equivalent to the annual emissions of over 1 million cars – with Swedish energy provider Stockholm Exergi already signed up for the transportation and storage of up to 900,000 tonnes of CO₂ annually from 2028.

With its flexible, ship-based model, Northern Lights is uniquely positioned to serve a growing network of customers across Europe. “Provided there is a jetty and storage tanks,” says Heidi, “we can go anywhere to pick up CO₂, and transport and then store it.”