Åpnet CO₂-fangstanlegg: – Viktig dag

On Monday, Yara's CO2 capture facility in Sluiskil opened with prominent guests including Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten, and EU Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra. This is Yara's largest industrial CO2 capture plant in Europe, according to the company. It marks an important day for Yara and European industry, as it demonstrates that large-scale industrial de-carbonization is possible today, says Yara CEO Svein Tore Holsether.

The Sluiskil ammonia and glycol plant will capture up to 800,000 tons of CO2 per year, which would amount to 12 million tons over 15 years, if the conditions are right, Yara writes in the statement. The CO2 will be shipped to Norway and stored at the Northern Lights facility off Øygarden in Vestland county. Two ships from the Netherlands will carry CO2 to Norway each week, with each ship being able to transport 7,200 tons. The first shipment to Norway is expected in September, according to Aftenposten.

Yara believes CO2 capture is a necessary technology to reduce the company's emissions. In 2025, the company and its products (Scope 1, 2 and 3) had emissions of over 62 million tons of CO2 equivalents, according to its annual report. This is more than the total emissions of Norway. Yara decided to invest in the capture facility in 2023.

One year ago, Equinor and its partners TotalEnergies and Shell pumped CO2 into the reservoirs of the Northern Lights facility for the first time. This is part of the prestige project Langskip, which has received a large amount of state support to capture CO2 from a cement factory and a waste disposal facility and store it permanently in a Norwegian aquifer.

But Northern Lights needs more customers. Yara in Sluiskil is now sending its first loads to Norway, four years after the plans were reported at the Oil & Gas Show ONS in 2022. Northern Lights has also agreed to take CO2 from two of Ørsteds biomass power plants in Denmark. Northern Lights decided in the previous year to invest 7.5 billion kroner to increase storage capacity to five million tons of CO2 per year, from the previous 1.5 million tons.

This came after an agreement for storage with Stockholm Exergi, which will capture CO2 from a large biomass power plant for 13 billion kroner. The expansion of Northern Lights received approximately 1.5 billion kroner in support from the EU Connecting Europe Facility for Energy, but will not receive any additional support from the Norwegian state.

The EU Commission has referred to the need for storage capacity for 50 million tons of CO2 from 2030. By 2040, the EU will need to capture and store 250 million tons of CO2 per year to meet its goal of climate neutrality by 2050, according to the Commission. Equinor has previously launched an ambition of 30-50 million tons of storage capacity by 2035.

Climate transition is not happening at the pace the world agreed upon in the Paris Agreement in 2015. The world is on track for 1.8 degrees average temperature rise in 2100, according to a UNEP report last week. The Paris goal of maximum 1.5 degrees warming is considered unachievable with today's politics, according to UNEP's Limiting Overshoot report.

The organization warns that a changed climate could lead to serious damages for health, food security and water access. They also warn of possible tipping points that could have dramatic consequences such as collapse of large ice sheets, degradation of the Amazon rainforest or disruptions in major ocean currents. The EU is working on establishing a CO2 storage market and has outlined its plans in the Net Zero Industry Act (NZIA).

Norway has also taken this regulation into consideration for review. The matter was on hearing two years ago. At that time, Equinor stated in a statement that Norway could contribute to EU storage plans, but that equal conditions for actors in the EU were needed. "If Norway is held out of NZIA, it is difficult to see how CO2 storage on a Norwegian aquifer, and perhaps even the accompanying capture projects in the EU and infrastructure projects that connect these, will be defined as net-zero strategic projects," Equinor wrote in 2024.

In that case, EU authorities, oil and gas companies, infrastructure actors and companies with CO2 to be stored might choose storage in the EU over storage in a Norwegian aquifer, Equinor wrote in 2024.