Monday, April 28, 2025

CO₂ By Sea: The Risky Bet Beneath Europe’s Biggest Carbon Storage Project

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Northern Lights is Europe’s most bold carbon seize and storage undertaking, and probably probably the most operationally critical one on the earth. It deserves credit score for getting previous the pilot stage, for designing an end-to-end storage system with actual injection capability, and for contracting with emitters in 4 totally different international locations. Nevertheless it’s additionally revealing why so many carbon seize initiatives fail to scale. The reply isn’t within the geology or the chemistry.

Because the first article in this series on Northern Lights laid out, capturing and storing CO₂ at industrial scale stays a technically possible however economically fraught endeavor. Solely a slim band of emitters discover CCS workable right now. Those who do both produce comparatively pure CO₂ streams, as within the case of Yara’s ammonia plant, or profit from heavy authorities subsidies, as with the Norwegian cement and waste crops or Ørsted’s biomass crops in Denmark. Even below these best-case situations, capital prices typically exceed €250–600 million, and levelized seize prices ceaselessly vary from €80 to €150 per ton—far above prevailing carbon costs.

The logistics and security dangers of CO₂ transport to water for the Northern Lights undertaking add one other layer of problem. Whereas most confirmed initiatives are situated straight on water with port entry for ship-based CO₂ export, initiatives like Ørsted’s Avedøre plant face pricey interim trucking preparations till a high-pressure pipeline—nonetheless dealing with security, allowing, and public acceptance hurdles—might be constructed. The dangers of dense-phase CO₂ transport, vividly demonstrated by the 2020 pipeline rupture in Satartia, Mississippi, will not be hypothetical, notably in densely populated Europe. Every undertaking should incorporate costly security methods, buffer storage, and rigorous monitoring.

The second a part of the reply is from the water to the sequestration website. From the start, Northern Lights has relied completely on marine transport. There are not any lengthy pipelines. There isn’t any cross-border community. There’s solely the ocean. Each emitter liquefies CO₂ at their facility, shops it quickly in buffer tanks, after which hundreds it onto a ship that carries it to Øygarden, on the west coast of Norway. There, the CO₂ is transferred to shore tanks, compressed once more, and piped offshore to a saline aquifer greater than two kilometers beneath the seabed. It’s, from an engineering perspective, sensible. Each element is engineered to excessive security requirements. The injection formation is well-characterized. The liquefaction is industrial grade. The compression and measurement gear is cutting-edge. The lacking ingredient is an efficient cause to do that as an alternative of higher options like avoiding emitting CO2 within the first place.

Part 1 continues to be below development. It contains the Øygarden terminal, injection wellhead, and a brief subsea pipeline to the storage formation. It additionally features a pair of seven,500 m³ liquefied CO₂ ships, initially, with two extra becoming a member of in a 12 months. These vessels are custom-built with pressurized, cryogenic tanks, LNG-fueled propulsion methods, and wind-assisted rotor sails. Every can carry roughly 6,500 to 7,000 tons of CO₂ per voyage. The Part 1 clients—Heidelberg Supplies, Hafslund Celsio, Yara Worldwide, Ørsted—will collectively ship about 1.5 million tons of CO₂ yearly. On most legs, the distances are modest: Brevik and Oslo are each inside 350 nautical miles of Øygarden. Sluiskil, within the Netherlands, is longer—round 700 nautical miles. Every voyage takes a number of days, and with a small fleet, meaning cautious scheduling. There’s restricted room for error. If a ship is delayed, CO₂ backs up on the emitter website. If the Øygarden tanks are full or below upkeep, the ship waits, burning gas.

They’re making each effort to make these ships low-carbon. They’re slow-steaming. They’re utilizing hull-bubblers to scale back hull friction. The Magnus-effect rotors work, and fortunately they’re solely claiming that they make the ship a couple of proportion factors extra environment friendly for particular situations, as an alternative of pretending that they’re a large win. Norway does love its Flettner rotors for some cause, regardless of neither Flettner, the engineer who invented them, nor Magus, the physicist who found the impact, being German.

The LNG half is blended. Norwegian pure fuel comes from a system engineered to keep away from leakage and different emissions, not like US pure fuel. Because of this, upstream emissions are low. And it does burn with decrease CO2 emissions than bunker gas. However the maritime delivery gas laws associated to greenhouse fuel emissions at the moment don’t require methane slippage from maritime engines be taken under consideration, and because the Worldwide Council on Clear Transportation (ICCT) Fugitive Unburnt Emissions from Transport (FUMES) report from a few years in the past made clear, it was about double what the trade thought it was, elevating LNG burning engines above bunker gas in full lifecycle greenhouse fuel emissions.

Will the ships truly be decrease emissions than easier, cheaper ones that burn bunker gas? Exhausting to say, however they received’t be as a lot of a win as is claimed. That mentioned, greenhouse fuel emissions with out methane slippage are within the 2-3% of transported, and with slippage could be 5%, so if all the system made sense, this could be cheap. And there are additional levers to drag on delivery fuels.

With capital prices of those new, complicated and high-tech ships, upkeep and operations, simply transporting the CO2 from dock to dock provides round €30 to the associated fee.

Part 2 is extra bold. It’s supposed to greater than triple annual volumes to five million tons. It provides Stockholm Exergi to the client base, however no different confirmed ones, making section 2 look more and more unlikely as potential shoppers like BASF again away. The emitters are anticipated to be additional afield. Stockholm to Øygarden is sort of 2,000 kilometers spherical journey. The ships get bigger—12,500 to twenty,000 m³—and extra quite a few. The propulsion stays LNG-based, with per-voyage gas consumption within the vary of 80 to 130 tons of LNG relying on the route and velocity. That gas is environment friendly by maritime requirements, however nonetheless emits between 2.7 and three tons of CO₂ per ton burned. By the point Part 2 is working at full quantity, the delivery phase alone will emit 30,000 to 50,000 tons of CO₂ per 12 months. That’s two to 3 % of the very carbon the system is being constructed to take away.

That wouldn’t be a deal-breaker—many local weather methods contain embedded emissions—if the choice have been costlier or much less dependable. However that’s the problem. The choice isn’t hypothetical. It’s pipelines. And for all of Part 2’s engineering energy, there’s nonetheless no pipeline within the plan. Each emitter is constructing their very own liquefaction and storage infrastructure. Each port wants its personal loadout arms and cryogenic tanks. Øygarden wants to dump, buffer, and inject 5 million tons per 12 months, in cadence with ship arrivals. There isn’t any aggregation level. No trunkline. No resilience past scheduling and redundancy.

This was one of many elements that pushed Yara to rethink its long-term technique. The Sluiskil website is well-positioned for direct ship loading, and the preliminary funding was justified by timing and availability. However as Dutch pipeline-connected storage initiatives like Porthos and Aramis advance, the financial case for marine transport turns into more durable to defend. A pipeline doesn’t cease for climate. It doesn’t have to berth. It doesn’t emit. As soon as it’s within the floor and below the ocean, it strikes CO₂ constantly, at excessive capability, for many years. And as soon as emitters start evaluating lifecycle prices—not simply of transport, however of buffer tanks, liquefiers, compressor upkeep, and carbon allowance publicity—the pipeline wins. Compression and transportation are anticipated to be €12 to €30 per ton, nicely below the mix of buffering storage, liquefaction and delivery. This nonetheless isn’t notably low-cost as it’s only for shifting the waste fuel round. It nonetheless must be captured and cleaned on the level of emission after which must be managed and injected on the sequestration website, each of which add important prices. And sequestration websites replenish, so pipeline capital prices can develop into difficult to justify.

Yara hasn’t made an official break. Their contract with Northern Lights stays. However their rising engagement with Dutch pipeline initiatives is telling. The underlying message is that delivery is viable, however it isn’t everlasting. It’s what you do earlier than you might have a community. It’s what you employ to purchase time.

Northern Lights, to its credit score, has pushed the envelope. It has introduced collectively governments, emitters, and oil majors in a undertaking that may function at actual industrial scale, though it stays to be seen if even its present clients will keep loyal. That’s greater than most CCS efforts ever obtain. However the transport system is pricey, complicated, and susceptible to disruption. It really works provided that each hyperlink within the chain—compression, liquefaction, buffer, delivery, offload, reinjection—features at once. The margin for error is measured in hours.

In fact, the ships are a part of the 80% of capital prices that Norway is paying for out of its sovereign wealth fund in an effort to remain related in a world that received’t need its pure fuel and positively received’t need its hydrogen for vitality sooner or later. However even after 80% of the capital value is taken care of, the delivery prices €30 per ton for a homeopathic 1.5 million tons a 12 months, a lot of which ought to have been prevented by truly decarbonizing the processes as an alternative by way of electrification, various processes and biogenic feedstocks. That’s what ought to be being backed, not ships plying lengthy North Sea routes by way of stormy climate stuffed with CO2.

The following article will take care of the sequestration website and its challenges and prices. Keep tuned for extra unhealthy information for CCS.

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