Norway's Northern Lights CO2 storage facility in the North Sea has received its first injection of CO2 as planned, operator Norwegian state-controlled Equinor said.
The CO2 left cement producer Heidelberg Materials' factory in Brevik, southeast Norway, on a ship and was then transported through a 100-km pipeline and injected into the Aurora reservoir under the seabed.
Northern Lights is the CO2 transport and storage section of Norway's Longship carbon capture and storage (CCS) project — Europe's first complete CCS value chain — which has been operational since June. TotalEnergies, Shell and Equinor are equal partners in Northern Lights.
The Norwegian government approved earlier this year the development plan for a second phase of Northern Lights, which will take the CO2 storage capacity to "at least" 5mn t/yr, from 1.5mn t/yr in its initial phase. Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies took a final investment decision on the second phase in March.
"This decision was made possible after signing of an agreement to transport and store up to 900,000t of CO2 annually from [Swedish utility] Stockholm Exergi," Equinor said. The Northern Lights expansion has received a grant from the Connecting Europe Facility for Energy (CEF Energy) funding scheme, the firm said.
The capacity of the first phase is fully booked, Equinor said today. Phase 2 is "well underway" with the delivery of nine CO2 storage tanks at Oygarden this summer, Equinor said.
