In Norway, a World First in Carbon Storage

Norway just marked a world first. The Northern Lights consortium, backed by Equinor, Shell, and TotalEnergies, has launched a commercial carbon-storage initiative that involves injecting captured CO2 under the North Sea seabed. The operation, announced Monday, aims to help curb climate change by intercepting emissions from industrial sites across Europe before they reach the atmosphere.

• Here's how it works: CO2 is gathered at facilities like Germany's Heidelberg Materials cement plant, liquefied, and shipped to a terminal near Bergen. Per a release, the two specialized ships tasked with that transport "are among the largest liquefied carbon carriers globally." From there, the carbon travels through a 68-mile pipeline before being buried nearly 1.6 miles under the ocean floor for long-term storage.

• The UN and International Energy Agency see carbon capture and storage (CCS) as essential for tackling emissions from difficult-to-clean industries, such as cement and steel. "This demonstrates the viability of carbon capture, transport, and storage as a scalable industry," says Equinor CEO Anders Opedal, per Reuters.
• Still, the technology faces skepticism—it's expensive, complex, and not yet widely adopted. At present, it's often cheaper for companies to buy "pollution permits" than pay for full-scale capture and storage. So far, Northern Lights has inked just three commercial contracts: one apiece with a Dutch ammonia plant, two Danish biofuel plants, and a Swedish power station.
• Heavily funded by the Norwegian government, the facility can currently stow away 1.7 million tons of CO2 a year, with plans to more than triple that by decade's end.