Norway’s pioneering carbon capture and storage project Northern Lights is complete and ready for operation.

Norwegian minister of energy Terje Aasland was on site at the terminal in Oygarden today to open the 1.5 mtpa facility.

The project developer held its seventh annual Northern Lights Summit to mark the opening of what joint-venture partners Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies said is the world’s first cross-border CO2 transport and storage facility.

Four specialised 7,500-cbm liquefied CO2 carriers are being built at Dalian Shipbuilding and Offshore Co in China to serve the project.

The first two — currently listed as the Northern Pioneer and Northern Pathfinder — were originally due to have been delivered by the middle of this year. But Clarksons’ Shipping Intelligence Network now details them both for handovers in October.

Northern Lights is part of the Norwegian full-scale CCS project named Longship.

Captured and liquefied CO2 will be shipped from industrial emitters in northern Europe to the terminal from where it will be sent via a 110-km long pipeline to the offshore storage location 2,600 metres below the seabed in the North Sea for permanent storage.

Northern Lights’ first 1.5 mtpa is fully booked. Equinor said the partners are working on plans to increase the transport and storage capacity for the future.

Equinor has overseen the construction of the onshore plant in Oygarden and the offshore facilities on behalf of the joint-venture partners.

The budget of this scope is NOK 7.5bn ($714m) but does not include the ships or the CO2 capture plants.

The first phase of this development of the value chain is 80% funded by the Norwegian state as part of the Longship project.

Equinor chief executive Anders Opedal said: “The completion of the Northern Lights facility marks an important milestone for the global development of a business model for carbon capture, transport and storage.

“It opens a value chain for the decarbonisation of European industry and energy and shows the role we and our partners take in developing low-carbon solutions in the energy transition.”

Describing the Northern Lights project as “a guiding star”, Opedal highlighted Germany, Denmark and the UK as active in developing CCS.

He revealed that the company hopes to take final investment decisions on two UK-based CCS projects this year.

Opedal said 3 to 5 gigatonnes of CCS will be required by 2050 adding: “Rapid scale up is urgently required.”

He said the experience from Northern Lights will be “valuable in maturing and scaling up future CCS projects”.

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