Norway just marked a world first. The Northern Lights consortium, backed by Equinor, Shell, and TotalEnergies, has launched a commercial carbon-storage initiative that involves injecting captured CO2 under the North Sea seabed. The operation, announced Monday, aims to help curb climate change by intercepting emissions from industrial sites across Europe before they reach the atmosphere.
- Here's how it works: CO2 is gathered at facilities like Germany's Heidelberg Materials cement plant, liquefied, and shipped to a terminal near Bergen. Per a release, the two specialized ships tasked with that transport "are among the largest liquefied carbon carriers globally." From there, the carbon travels through a 68-mile pipeline before being buried nearly 1.6 miles under the ocean floor for long-term storage.