Northern Lights Joint Venture has successfully injected and stored its first volumes of carbon dioxide 2,600 meters below the seabed in the North Sea, ushering in a new era in carbon capture and storage.
The project marks the world’s first third-party CO2 transport and storage initiative, aiming to significantly reduce European greenhouse gas emissions and help the continent achieve its climate goals.
The CO2 is initially shipped from a Heidelberg Materials cement factory in Brevik, Norway, before being offloaded at the Øygarden facility, according to Equinor’s announcement.
From there, it is transported through a 100-kilometer subsea pipeline and injected into the Aurora reservoir. “With CO2 safely stored below the seabed, we mark a major milestone.
This demonstrates the viability of carbon capture, transport, and storage as a scalable industry,” said Anders Opedal, CEO of Equinor, one of the three equal owners of the joint venture.
Other partner companies include Shell and TotalEnergies . The initial phase of the project has a storage capacity of 1.5 million metric tons of CO2 per year, which is already fully booked.
The Northern Lights partnership has already approved Phase 2 of the project, aiming to boost capacity to a minimum of 5 million metric tons annually.
The expansion, which builds on the existing infrastructure, includes additional onshore storage tanks, a new jetty, and more injection wells, partly funded by a grant from the Connecting Europe Facility for Energy.
Equinor, the project’s technical service provider, has already begun construction on the second phase, with nine new CO2 storage tanks recently delivered to the Øygarden site.
This project aligns with Equinor’s ambitious goal of developing 30 to 50 million metric tons of CO2 transport and storage capacity by 2035, with the company actively working on several other projects across Europe and the U.S.