Northern Lights, a joint venture between TotalEnergies, Shell and Equinor, has completed the world’s first commercial CO2 transport and storage project in Norway. This is an important step for international efforts to reduce carbon emissions, as the building is equipped to absorb and store CO2 captured by European industry, which is very difficult to eliminate. The project, which started in late 2020, will become the transportation and storage arm of Longship, Norway’s coal capture and storage (CCS) project. The Longship was introduced by the Norwegian government in September 2020 as a priority to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. CCS is important for hard-to-reduce sectors, industries that struggle to reduce carbon emissions from energy sources. Anna Mascolo, CEO of Shell Low Carbon Solutions, emphasized the importance of CCS in achieving global climate goals. Along with efforts to reduce and prevent emissions, CCS is important to support industry on their investment journey, he said.
The Northern Lights infrastructure includes a terminal to extract CO2 from industrial sources, a 100 km sea pipeline to transport CO2 to an external storage facility, and an underground injection facility water that holds CO2 2,600 meters below the seabed. of this project has the capacity to transfer and store 1.5 million tons of CO2 per year, and research is ongoing to increase this capacity to more than 5 million tons in the second phase. The capacity of the first unit has been well reserved by consumers in Norway and throughout Europe. The first CO2 injection is expected in 2025. Gareth Tuit, Vice President Low Carbon Solutions at Equinor, was proud of the completion of the project and said that the Northern Lights are an important symbol in the creation of the CCS value chain in Europe. Arnaud Le Foll, Vice President New Business – Carbon Neutrality at TotalEnergies, hailed the project as an important milestone in the decarbonisation of European industry. He emphasized the readiness of the infrastructure to save carbon and predicted that the first books will be brought in 2025 from the difficult sectors to reduce.