A carbon storage project owned by three major European oil firms has secured its first commercial deal in what they billed today as a "major milestone" in the decarbonisation of heavy industry.
Northern Lights is owned by France's TotalEnergies, Norway's Equinor and Anglo-Dutch giant Shell.
It reached an agreement to transport and store carbon dioxide captured from Yara Sluiskil, an ammonia and fertiliser plant in the Netherlands.
From early 2025, 800,000 tonnes of CO2 per year will be captured, compressed and liquefied in the Netherlands.
It will then be transported by ship to the Northern Lights site in Norway to be buried some 2,600 metres (8,530 feet) under the seabed off the coast of Oygarden.
"This agreement, the first of its kind worldwide, is a major milestone in the decarbonisation of heavy industry in Europe, paving the way for international CO2 transport and storage as a service," TotalEnergies said in a statement.
Northern Lights managing director Borre Jacobsen said the agreement "will establish a market for CO2 transport and storage".
The facilities for the first phase of the project are scheduled to come on stream in 2024, with the capacity to handle 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year.
In its latest baseline report on climate change, the United Nations said the world will need to capture and store CO2 from the air and oceans regardless of the rate at which countries succeed at reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.
Long seen as a marginal effort or an industrial ploy to avoid reducing carbon emissions, carbon dioxide removal measures are now a necessity, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
But some environmentalists see carbon capture and storage as a "false solution" that would justify maintaining dirty production, with the risk that stocked CO2 could leak.