Norway’s Northern Lights gears up to receive first commercial CO2

Norway's Northern Lights CO2 store is readying itself to receive and store a first cargo, with customer Heidelberg Materials loading liquefied CO2 onto the tanker Northern Pioneer, the joint venture said June 3.

Heidelberg Materials is supplying CO2 from its Brevik cement plant for the start of operations at the 1.5 million mt/year facility, which was completed in September.

"Commissioning has started, with liquefied CO2 from our first customer Heidelberg Materials in Brevik, now beginning gassing up our vessel Northern Pioneer," Northern Lights said on a LinkedIn post. "This marks an important milestone in establishing Europe's first open and commercial CO2 transport and storage value chain."

Northern Lights has lined up four CO2 carriers to supply its operations. The tankers will transport CO2 from industrial capture sites in Europe to the Oygarden receiving terminal in Norway.

From there, the CO2 will be transported via a 100-km pipeline to the offshore subsea storage facility 2,600 m below the seabed in the North Sea.

Northern Lights is a JV between Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies.

The JV said May 6 it had received all the permits required to start injecting and storing CO2 in the Aurora license in the North Sea.

The project partners took a positive final investment decision on a second phase of the project on March 27, expanding the facility to 5 million mt/year CO2.

The expansion FID followed a commercial agreement with Stockholm Exergi to transport and store 900,000 mt/year of CO2 over 15 years.

The first phase capacity is fully booked. Other Northern Lights customers include fertilizer producer Yara, Orsted and the Hafslund Oslo Celsio waste-to-energy plant.

The Northern Lights store is part of the Norwegian Longship CCS project, the first commercial CCS project in Europe, which includes CO2 capture from industrial sources.

Platts, part of S&P Global Commodity Insights, assessed nearest December EU ETS carbon allowances at Eur71.02/mt ($80.87/mt) on June 2. That compares with industry estimates of full value chain CCS costs in the region of Eur130-150/mt.