Together with partners Shell and Equinor, TotalEnergies has announced the start of carbon dioxide (CO2) storage at the Northern Lights facility.
Northern Lights is the world’s first merchant project for transporting and storing CO2. The very first shipment of CO2 came from a cement factory operated by Heidelberg Materials in Brevik, Norway. It was transported to Øygarden, where the facilities for Northern Lights are located. It was then injected into a reservoir about 60 miles off the coast of Norway for permanent storage 2,600 metres under the seabed.
TotalEnergies’ senior vice president for the carbon neutrality business, Arnaud Le Foll, said about the development:
“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.”
TotalEnergies, which makes the Total coolant and metalworking products, says it uses the best technologies available to avoid emissions where feasible. It says it is also developing industrial carbon storage projects to mitigate its remaining emissions from hard-to-abate processes.
The Northern Lights project already has five industrial customers, giving it a strong customer base to build upon. Indeed, its initial capacity for storing up to 1.5 million tons of CO2 each year has already been booked up. A second development phase received a final investment decision earlier in the year. This will take the facility’s storage capacity to 5 million tons of CO2 each year from 2028.
