Could Norway become a graveyard for CO2 emissions?

Cement production accounts for about 6 percent of global emissions, so here at Heidelberg’s plant in Brevik they will be capturing 50 percent of the CO2 from their chimneys and store it instead of emitting it. The gas is separated from the rest of the emissions, then cooled off and compressed into a liquid form that is shipped away to a storage facility.

Separating CO2 from the other waste gases is expensive and energy intensive, but the Brevik plant uses recycled heat from the cement kiln to power its desorber. The industry also argues that CO2 is an inevitable by-product in cement production, and that they can only reduce current emissions by a third through other means, making carbon capture and storage (CCS) the only way to make their product carbon neutral.

The ships will arrive at the Northern Lights facility off the West coast where a set of pumps will unload the liquefied CO2 into the terminal, and from there, a pipeline will take it 100 kilometres out to sea and inject it 2 kilometres under the seabed.

The under-sea storage aquifer will store up to 1.5 million tonnes per year in its first phase, with a view to scale it up to 5 million per year in 2030. And the clients are lining up: apart from Heidelberg Materials, Dutch fertiliser giant Yara and Danish energy company Orsted have already signed deals to the tune of 1.23 million tonnes of CO2 per year.

Northern Lights’s Managing Director Borre Jacobsen believes that if demand rises enough in the years to come, pipelines could spring up across Europe to transport carbon from industrial hubs to facilities like this one.

The Norwegian government financed 80 percent of the project – Total, Shell, and Equinor covered the remaining 20 percent. The oil giants, who will