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Highlights

  • First CO₂ volumes shipped from Brevik and injected into Øygarden storage.
  • Northern Lights Phase 1 capacity 1.5 MtCO₂/year fully booked by customers.
  • Second-phase FID expands capacity to over 5 MtCO₂/year from 2028.

TotalEnergies and its partners Equinor and Shell announced the successful transport and subsea injection of the first CO₂ volumes from Heidelberg Materials’ cement plant in Brevik to Northern Lights’ facilities in Øygarden. The CO₂ was injected about 2,600 metres below the seabed, roughly 100 km off Norway’s western coast, marking the start of commercial operations for the merchant transport-and-storage venture.

Northern Lights — a joint venture owned equally by TotalEnergies, Equinor and Shell — describes itself as the world’s first merchant CO₂ transport and storage project, providing a service model that allows industrial emitters to ship emissions for permanent geological storage. The project’s first phase has a capacity of 1.5 million tonnes CO₂ per year and is reported fully booked by customers from Norway and continental Europe.

The shipments currently originate from industrial capture sites such as Heidelberg Materials’ Brevik cement plant; other anchor customers include Hafslund Celsio, Yara, Ørsted and Stockholm Exergi. The operators have completed onshore reception and subsea infrastructure and report that controlled injection operations are now under way.

In March 2025 the partners announced a Final Investment Decision (FID) on Phase 2, which is intended to scale Northern Lights’ capacity to more than 5 Mt CO₂ per year from 2028. Backers and national authorities have framed the project as a key lever for decarbonising hard-to-abate industrial sectors, offering an off-the-shelf transport-and-storage route rather than bespoke pipelines for each emitter.

Observers note the move from demonstration to commercial operation brings practical and policy questions into focus: operational scaling, long-term storage monitoring, and the economics of CCS. Norway’s Longship-related support and broader public funding have been central to development, and analysts have emphasised that wider deployment will hinge on sustained policy frameworks and carbon-pricing signals to make the service commercially viable at scale.