Equinor northern lights is ready to receive CO2

September 30, 2024

The Northern Lights Carbon Capture and Storage facilities at Øygarden outside of Bergen Photo: Northern Lights credit:Equinor

The world’s first cross-border CO₂ transport and storage facility is completed and ready to receive and store CO₂.

The Norwegian Minister of Energy conducts the official opening of the Northern Lights CO₂ transport and storage facility in Øygarden, near Bergen. The Northern Lights facility is a joint venture between Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies.

The Norwegian Minister of Energy, Terje Aasland (left), and Equinor CEO Anders Opedal.

Photo: Torstein Lund Eik / Equinor

“The completion of the Northern Lights facility marks an important milestone for the global development of a business model for carbon capture, transport and storage. It opens a value chain for decarbonisation of European industry and energy and shows the role we and our partners take in developing low carbon solutions in the energy transition,” says CEO Anders Opedal.

Large scale carbon capture, transport and storage (CCS) will play a key role in the energy transition as it offers a solution for large and hard-to-abate industrial emitters that need to decarbonise their processes.

The Northern Lights project is part of the Norwegian full-scale CCS project named Longship. The full-scale project includes capture of CO₂ from industrial sources and shipping of liquid CO₂ to the terminal in Øygarden. From there, the liquified CO₂ will be transported by pipeline to the offshore storage location below the seabed in the North Sea, for safe and permanent storage.

The Northern Lights Carbon Capture and Storage facilities

Photo: Torstein Lund Eik / Equinor

“This project demonstrates what can be achieved when authorities and industry are working towards the same goal and co-invest to reduce risks. Equinor has several CO₂ transport and storage developments in our portfolio as operator and partner. The established Northern Lights value chain and experience from the project will be valuable in maturing and scaling up future CCS projects,” says Opedal.

The first phase capacity of 1.5 million tons of CO₂ per year is fully booked, and the joint venture owners continue to work on plans to increase the transport and storage capacity for the future.

Equinor and CCS

Equinor continues to work on a broad portfolio of CCS projects and license opportunities. We operate CCS at our Snøhvit and Sleipner fields on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. In Northwest Europe, the UK and the US we mature new capture, transport and storage projects onshore and offshore. Such new developments require continued collaboration between governments, industry, customers and regulators to enable large scale CCS solutions.

Northern Lights

Northern Lights JV is a registered, incorporated General Partnership with Shared Liability (DA), equally owned by Equinor, TotalEnergies and Shell.
The Northern Lights facility consists of a receiving terminal, injection pipeline and subsea installations.
Equinor has been in charge of building the onshore plant in Øygarden as well as the offshore facilities on behalf of Northern Lights JV and partners. The budget of this scope is 7.5 billion NOK. This does not include the ships or the CO₂ capture plants.
The first phase of this development of the value chain is 80 per cent funded by the Norwegian state as part of the Longshipproject.
Longship is a comprehensive CCS project initiated by the Norwegian government, aiming to demonstrate CO₂ capture, transport, and storage at scale.
Northern Lights, a key part of this initiative, focuses specifically on the transport and storage elements.
Captured and liquefied CO₂ at the customers sites is transported by ship to the onshore receiving terminal at Øygarden.
From the terminal, CO₂ is transported by pipeline for storage in a reservoir 2.600 meters under the seabed in the North Sea.
The Northern Lights project created ripple effects in 2023 of 1.7 bn NOK in deliveries, over 900 man-years and 1.3 bn NOK in value creation.