From Heidelberg in Brevik Norway to Northern Lights’ facilities in Øygarden

By Victor Uchechukwu

Energy Window International (Media). TotalEnergies and its partners – Shell and Equinor have announced that their first CO₂ volumes have been successfully transported from Heidelberg Materials’ cement factory in Brevik, Norway to Northern Lights’ facilities in Øygarden by vessel. They were then injected 2,600 meters below the seabed into the storage facilities, 100 km off the coast of Western Norway.

Northern Lights according to TotalEnergies email statement is the world’s first merchant CO₂ transportation and storage project. The statement also disclosed that the first phase of the project already has a storage capacity of 1.5 Mt CO₂/year, which the French major says has already been fully booked by customers from Norway and Continental Europe. The statement added that the Final Investment Decision of the second phase was announced in March 2025, and this is with the expectation of increasing capacity to more than 5 Mt CO₂/year from 2028.

It is common belief that the development of CO₂ transport and storage services is one of the necessary levers for reducing emissions for European industry. Meanwhile, and according to the statement, the Northern Lights already have a strong customer base in Norway and continental Europe, besides five industrial customers who are, Hafslund Celsio and Heidelberg Materials in Norway, Yara in the Netherlands, Ørsted in Denmark and Stockholm Exergi in Sweden.

“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”, says Arnaud Le Foll, Senior Vice-President New Business – Carbon Neutrality at TotalEnergies.

Northern Lights, owned in equal shares by TotalEnergies, Equinor and Shell as Energy Window International (Media) gathered, is developing the world’s first cross-border CO₂ transport and storage infrastructure. Its services are also expected to enable mitigation of industrial emissions that cannot be avoided while accelerating the decarbonization of European industry. Drawing on experience from over 25 years of CO₂ storage on the Norwegian Continental Shelf according to TotalEnergies, Northern Lights is now at the forefront of developing CCS technologies, TotalEnergies said. 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 2,600 meters under the seabed. “CCS is a necessary climate solution to decarbonize industry and reduce or remove industrial CO₂ emissions.”