Northern Lights stores first CO2 in Norway

Northern Lights JV has announced that the first CO2 volumes have been transported through its 100-km pipeline and injected into the Aurora reservoir, located 2,600 m beneath the seabed of the Norwegian North Sea.

Northern Lights JV managing director Tim Heijn said the company had now injected and stored CO2 safely in the reservoir, and the ships, facilities and wells are in operation.

The joint venture intends to continue transporting and storing CO2 from Norway during the remainder of 2025, with volumes from Denmark and the Netherlands scheduled to follow in 2026.

Northern Lights JV is registered as a General Partnership with Shared Liability and is owned by Equinor, TotalEnergies and Shell.

In March 2025, Northern Lights reached a final investment decision on its expansion project, which will increase transport and storage capacity from 1.5M tonnes of CO2 per year to at least 5M tonnes per year.

The expansion comes after it signed a commercial agreement with Stockholm Exergi and is supported by a grant from the Connecting Europe Facility for Energy funding scheme. It builds on the existing infrastructure and includes additional onshore storage tanks, pumps, a new jetty, injection wells and further CO2 transport ships to support the increased injection rate and volumes.

Mr Heijn said the company is continuing to build additional capacity following the positive investment decision for the second phase.

According to Northern Lights, liquefied CO2 is shipped from capture sites to its onshore receiving terminal in western Norway before being transported by pipeline for permanent storage in the reservoir. The company describes itself as the first to provide commercial carbon capture and storage services.

The first phase of Northern Lights is part of Longship, the Norwegian government’s fullscale carbon capture and storage project. During this phase, Northern Lights will handle CO2 from Heidelberg Materials’ cement factory in Brevik and Hafslund Celsio’s waste-to-energy plant in Oslo.

The joint venture has also signed commercial agreements with Yara in the Netherlands, Ørsted in Denmark and Stockholm Exergi in Sweden.