TotalEnergies and its partners, Equinor and Shell, have announced the successful transport of the first CO₂ volumes from Heidelberg Materials’ cement factory in Brevik, Norway to the Northern Lights facility in Øygarden. They were then injected 2,600 meters below the seabed into the Aura reservoir, 100km off the coast of Western Norway.

In a statement from TotalEnergies released on 25 August, the company referred to Northern Lights as “the world’s first merchant CO₂ transportation and storage project” and reported that the first phase of the project has a storage capacity of 1.5 Mt CO₂/year. This has been fully booked by customers including Hafslund Celsio and Heidelberg Materials in Norway, Yara in the Netherlands, Ørsted in Denmark, and Stockholm Exergi in Sweden.

The Final Investment Decision of the second phase was announced in March 2025, and will increase the project capacity to more than  5Mt CO₂/year from 2028.

Arnaud Le Foll, Senior Vice-President New Business – Carbon Neutrality at TotalEnergies said: “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.”

Northern Lights is owned in equal shares by TotalEnergies, Equinor and Shell. Delivering CO₂ transport and storage as a service, Northern Lights enables mitigation of industrial emissions that cannot be avoided and accelerates the decarbonisation of European industry.

See also Interview with Lise Winther of Yara.