Beneath the Fjord: Inside Northern Lights’ Carbon Storage Core

Join CleanTechnica’s Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott’s in-depth analyses and high level summariesjoin our daily newsletterand/or follow us on Google News!

Final Up to date on: twelfth April 2025, 08:22 pm

The Northern Lights carbon seize and storage mission is usually described as a logistics system, however at its core, it’s a storage facility. The Øygarden terminal, its connecting offshore pipeline, and the Johansen Formation are the infrastructure that turns cross-border CO₂ shipments into everlasting geological sequestration. Section 1 is just not a examine or a roadmap. It’s a constructed facility with injection-ready wells, a pressurized and instrumented seabed pipeline, and an onshore buffer system designed to obtain, re-pressurize, and inject 1.5 million tons of carbon dioxide per 12 months. The emitters might fluctuate, the ships might evolve, however this part of the system is designed to be everlasting.

This text is a part of a brief collection on Northern Lights. Within the first articleI appeared on the prospects doing carbon seize. The latest choice by BASF to stroll away from a delivery and storage settlement for its Antwerp-based Kairos@C mission illustrates the central dilemma: even when the engineering is sound, the enterprise case is fragile.

Section 1 of Northern Lights is now absolutely subscribed, however solely via a mixture of government-backed Norwegian tasks, EU-subsidized BECCS initiatives, and one low-cost industrial emitter—Yara—with an excellent location and pure CO₂ stream. Seize prices for many individuals stay effectively above €100 per ton, and in some instances, strategy or exceed €150 per ton. The economics merely don’t pencil out on carbon pricing alone. Even in best-case situations—the place seize websites are subsequent to water, liquefaction is on-site, and delivery distances are manageable—the necessity for subsidies stays. The one emitter not waterside in a port which the ships can use plans a pipeline which is, for my part, unlikely to be permitted, and is trucking 20 tons at a time 100 km to a waterside facility. Section 2 would require a fivefold scale-up, and there’s little proof but that this mannequin could be replicated with out even deeper public assist or a considerably greater carbon worth.

Within the second articleI targeted on the maritime transport system on the coronary heart of Northern Lights—a fleet of custom-built CO₂ carriers that hyperlink emitters in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden to the Øygarden storage terminal on Norway’s west coast. From an engineering perspective, the system is cutting-edge: cryogenic tanks, LNG propulsion, wind-assist rotor sails, and cautious integration with port and storage infrastructure. However from an financial and scalability standpoint, it’s a fragile and expensive answer to an issue we needs to be avoiding upstream.

Every ship carries round 6,500 to 7,000 tons of liquefied CO₂ per voyage in Section 1, and deliberate Section 2 ships will enhance that to 12,500 to twenty,000 m³. However the price of maritime transport—together with capital, operations, LNG gas, and emissions—provides roughly €30 per ton to the general CCS course of. With only some vessels in rotation, the system depends on tight scheduling and minimal room for error. Delays at sea or congestion at terminals can rapidly cascade into backlogs at emitter websites, that are all storing CO₂ in buffer tanks on-site. As distances enhance in Section 2—Stockholm to Øygarden is almost 2,000 km round-trip—the logistics develop into much more weak and emissions from the ships themselves rise, reaching 30,000 to 50,000 tons of CO₂ yearly from propulsion alone.

Norway has lined 80% of the capital price for this fleet and the storage facility via its sovereign wealth fund. Even so, the economics stay tenuous. Not like pipelines, ships require fixed fueling, berthing, climate routing, and staffing. Each emitter wants its personal liquefaction plant, each port its personal cryogenic loadout. This isn’t a replicable spine—it’s a bespoke workaround. And whereas it makes Northern Lights viable within the brief time period, the long-term development is already seen: emitters like Yara are evaluating pipeline-connected options with decrease lifecycle prices.

And so to the sequestration website the ships are crusing to. The Øygarden terminal sits on the rocky shoreline of western Norway, constructed into the fjord-adjacent industrial zone north of Bergen. In Section 1, it consists of twelve cylindrical buffer tanks, every with a capability of roughly 625 cubic meters, totaling 7,500 cubic meters of storage. That equates to 1 full cargo from a 7,500 m³ liquefied CO₂ service. The tanks are designed to carry liquid CO₂ at round –26 °C and 15–19 bar. Insulated and pressurized, they bridge the hole between marine supply and pipeline injection. When a ship arrives, the CO₂ is offloaded by way of cryogenic switch arms and enters the buffer system. From there, it’s pumped to greater pressures, metered, and pushed into the subsea pipeline at injection situations—roughly 110 to 150 bar relying on depth, temperature, and flowrate targets. The positioning consists of real-time sensors for strain, temperature, composition, and move.

The offshore pipeline is roughly 100 kilometers lengthy, terminating within the Johansen Formation beneath the North Sea. It’s a 12- to 16-inch diameter metal pipeline, internally coated to deal with dry CO₂ and designed to withstand ductile fracture from decompression or section change. The pipeline transports CO₂ in dense section—not absolutely liquid, not gaseous, however supercritical. Temperature and strain are maintained alongside the path to keep away from transitions that might have an effect on move. The burial depth and routing have been chosen to reduce threat from trawling, anchor strike, or seabed shifting. Operational flowrates are tailor-made to match injection wellhead strain and reservoir absorptive capability, which has been estimated at many tens of tens of millions of tons.

The injection goal is the Johansen Formation, a thick layer of porous sandstone positioned roughly 2,600 meters beneath sea degree. It’s overlaid by a dense shale caprock and bounded by further geological options that restrict upward migration. Seismic mapping, stratigraphic modeling, and reservoir simulations have confirmed its suitability for long-term storage. The injected CO₂ will occupy pore area in brine-saturated rock, spreading laterally and progressively dissolving. Northern Lights has dedicated to lively monitoring, together with seismic surveys, strain measurements, and geochemical tracers, to validate plume motion and containment. The wells themselves are steel-cased, cemented, and outfitted with packers and security valves. The anticipated lively injection lifespan is 20 to 30 years, with an additional multi-decade post-closure monitoring interval in compliance with the EU CCS Directive.

The system as constructed is as elegant, environment friendly, and engineered because it’s doable for a long-duration rubbish dump to be. However it’s not simply replicated. The situation of Øygarden supplies a novel intersection of deepwater port entry, brief offshore distance to storage, steady geology, and allowing underneath a single nationwide authority. The price of growing the onshore terminal, offshore pipeline, and wells is important—estimated at over 700 million USD for Section 1. The injection formation is well-characterized, certainly one of many such in Europe, however most aren’t as accessible. The system’s throughput is proscribed by the variety of ships it could obtain, the quantity it could buffer, and the capability of the wells. Enlargement past Section 1 requires new wells, extra tanks, and extra storage at emitters’ websites. None of those prices scale simply.

Even when Section 2 proceeds, the Øygarden terminal will stay the one injection level. It isn’t related to a broader community. There isn’t a continental pipeline feeding into it. Every emitter should remedy liquefaction, storage, and scheduling on their very own. The pipeline from the terminal to the formation is strong, however brief. It can’t accommodate new routes. It can’t develop geographically. It’s a terminus. The power might function for many years and should stay a high-performing carbon sink. However it’s not a mannequin for European CCS scale-up. It’s a closed loop with restricted attain, and each ton of CO₂ it shops will proceed to rely upon marine logistics till a broader community is constructed—if one ever is.

Even with the Norwegian authorities masking 80% of the capital prices for Northern Lights Section 1, the price of storing carbon underground at Øygarden stays important. When subsidies scale back the mission’s upfront capex from €700 million to simply €140 million borne by the operator, and annual opex nonetheless runs between €28 and €35 million per 12 months over 25 years, the absolutely loaded price of storage lands between €22 and €27 per ton of CO₂. That’s only for the terminal, the offshore pipeline, and the injection wells—excluding the price of seize, purification, liquefaction, or marine transport. For emitters, it’s an actual price—one they nonetheless have to soak up or go alongside, even in a best-case subsidy atmosphere. The Norwegian state could also be underwriting the infrastructure, however the enterprise case nonetheless is dependent upon somebody paying €20-plus per ton simply to make carbon disappear into rock. That’s on high of costly seize, cleaning, liquefaction and buffering storage for finest case, waterside places, after which delivery.

With out 80% capex subsidies, the very favorably positioned website can be charging double that for sequestration. Different websites, often rather a lot additional out to sea, will price extra. The prices of CCS have gotten very clear, and I believe its future is radically extra restricted than the fossil gas business has been claiming.