Europe's Largest Carbon Capture Facility Opens, Sending CO2 by Ship to North Sea Storage

Europe's largest industrial carbon capture facility has officially opened at Yara's ammonia and fertilizer complex in Sluiskil, the Netherlands, creating a new cross-border CO2 supply chain that will rely on specialized ships to carry captured carbon to permanent storage beneath the North Sea. The facility can capture and liquefy up to 800,000 tons of CO2 annually from ammonia production. From Sluiskil, the liquefied CO2 will be loaded aboard Northern Lights' purpose-built CO2 carriers and transported to the company's receiving terminal at Øygarden on Norway's west coast. From there, the CO2 will travel through a roughly 100-kilometer pipeline before being injected into the Aurora reservoir about 2,600 meters beneath the North Sea seabed. Yara said the project is expected to capture and permanently store around 12 million tons of CO2 over the next 15 years. 'This is an important day for Yara and for European industry,' said Yara International President and CEO Svein Tore Holsether. 'The carbon capture facility in Sluiskil proves that large-scale industrial decarbonization is possible today.' The inauguration was attended by Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten, European Commissioner for Climate, Net Zero and Clean Growth Wopke Hoekstra and Holsether. The project is particularly significant because it links industrial carbon capture in the Netherlands with ship-based transport and permanent geological storage in Norway, demonstrating a commercial cross-border carbon capture and storage, or CCS, chain. Northern Lights, a joint venture between Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies, began commercial operations last year after successfully injecting its first CO2 into storage beneath the North Sea. Its first cargoes came from Heidelberg Materials' cement plant in Brevik, Norway, with CO2 transported aboard specialized vessels to the Øygarden terminal. The first phase of Northern Lights has capacity to handle 1.5 million tons of CO2 annually and is fully booked. A second phase, approved in 2025, is expected to increase capacity to at least 5 million tons per year. The expansion has received €131 million in support from the European Union's Connecting Europe Facility for Energy program. Yara's Sluiskil volumes will add another major industrial source to the network and help establish seaborne CO2 transportation as an increasingly important part of Europe's emerging carbon-management infrastructure. 'This is a milestone we have been looking forward to,' said Tim Heijn, managing director of Northern Lights. 'Together, we are demonstrating that capture and cross-border CO2 transport and storage is a viable solution for European industry.' The development also highlights a potentially significant new shipping market. Large-scale CCS projects increasingly depend on liquefied CO2 carriers to connect industrial emitters that cannot economically access storage sites by pipeline. Northern Lights has developed purpose-built ships for that role, transporting liquefied CO2 at low temperature and elevated pressure between European industrial sites and Norway. At Sluiskil, Yara will capture CO2 generated during ammonia production, liquefy it and hold it in storage tanks until collection by Northern Lights vessels. Capturing the emissions will also allow Yara to avoid European carbon costs associated with the volumes sent for permanent storage. Yara operates what it describes as Europe's largest ammonia and fertilizer plant at Sluiskil. The company said CCS will help reduce the carbon footprint of products including fertilizers and ammonia, with potential applications extending to low-carbon fuels for shipping. European policymakers increasingly see CCS as one of the tools needed to decarbonize industries where eliminating emissions through electrification or renewable energy alone remains difficult, including fertilizer, cement and waste management. 'Europe needs practical climate solutions that deliver real emissions reductions while strengthening industrial competitiveness,' Hoekstra said. 'The carbon capture and storage project at Sluiskil shows what is possible when innovation and cross-border cooperation come together.' For Northern Lights, the Yara project also marks another step toward transforming CO2 transport and storage from a demonstration project into a broader commercial service serving industrial customers across Europe. Equinor, which provides technical services for Northern Lights, has said it is targeting development of between 30 million and 50 million tons per year of CO2 transport and storage capacity by 2035 across projects in Europe and the United States. With Yara's Sluiskil facility now entering the chain, specialized CO2 shipping is moving from an emerging concept toward an operational component of Europe's industrial decarbonization infrastructure.