Yara & Northern Lights ink key CCS deal

By Julian Atchison on September 15, 2022

The Northern Lights CCS project, a joint venture between Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies. Source: Northern Lights.
Click to enlarge. The Northern Lights CCS project, a joint venture between Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies. Source: Northern Lights.

Yara and Northern Lights have signed the world’s first commercial agreement for cross border CO2 transport and storage. From 2025, carbon emissions at Yara’s ammonia production plant in Sluiskil, Netherlands will be captured, compressed, and liquefied, before being transported to the Northern Lights sequestration site off the coast of Øygarden, Norway (2,600 metres under the seabed). The agreement paves the way for other European industrial emitters to negotiate similar contracts with offshore sequestration projects.

The Northern Lights is a joint venture between Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies, and makes up a key segment of the larger Longship project, a Norwegian government-funded initiative that seeks to create the world’s first “open access, full value chain CCS model” that will serve European customers.

Yara, our first commercial customer, will fill the available capacity of Northern Lights Phase 1. This agreement will establish a market for CO2 transport and storage. From early 2025, we will be shipping the first tons of CO2 from the Netherlands to Norway. This will demonstrate that CCS is a climate tool for Europe.

Northern Lights MD Børre Jacobsen in TotalEnergies’ official press release, 29 Aug 2022

Sluiskil decarbonisation: blue, green and waste hydrogen?

Besides the current announcement, Yara has been pursuing other options to decarbonise its Sluiskil production plant. In 2019, we reported on an agreement between Dow and Yara to use waste hydrogen for ammonia production, and then in 2020 on Yara’s announcement that Ørsted offshore wind power and an on-site 100MW electrolyser would combine to produce 75,000 tonnes per year of renewable ammonia at the plant (beginning in 2024-5). The offshore wind-to-ammonia pathway is part of the much larger SeaH2Land project, servicing industrial customers through the region.