Yara Sluiskil – a Dutch founded ammonia and fertilizer plant, which is based in the province Zeeland at the North Sea on the coast of The Netherlands. Since 1990, the company has made an effort on cutting down their CO2 emissions, for example through reusing their produced CO2 in greenhouse plant production, as an ingredient for carbonated drinks or it is being used as urea and AdBlue. With these efforts, Yara Sluiskil has already cut 3.4 million tons of CO2 per year. Now, the company wants to go a step further. Svein Tore Holsether, CEO of Yara International ASA stated in a recent interview that: “Action to decarbonize the industry is very urgent and we at Yara want to be a frontrunner. I am very pleased to announce that we are now on our way to removing CO2 emissions from our production plant in Sluiskil. This will take us a step further towards carbon-free food production and accelerate the supply of clean ammonia for fuel and power production.”
The agreement
The agreement between Yara and Northern Lights is based on commercial terms, to transport the CO2 that is captured from Yara Sluiskil, to transport and permanently store it under the seabed off the coast of western Norway. This agreement is groundbreaking for the decarbonization of the European heavy industry and opens a commercial market for cross border CO2 transport and storage as a service. It opens the opportunity for other industrial companies across all of Europe to look into Northern Lights and use the Yara – Northern Lights agreement as an example.
Børre Jacobsen, Managing Director of Northern Lights, said: “Yara is our first commercial customer, filling our available capacity in Northern Lights. With this, we are establishing a market for transport and storage of CO2. From early 2025 we will be shipping the first tons of CO2 from the Netherlands to Norway. This will demonstrate that CCS is a climate tool for Europe!”
About Northern Lights
Based on 20 years of offshore CO2 storage off the coast of Norway, Northern Lights is the world’s first open access full value chain CCS model. The infrastructure that is being created is flexible and offers the possibility to transport CO2 from industrial emitters by ship to one of the receiving terminals in western Norway for immediate storage, before being transported through a pipeline for long-term storage in a geological reservoir 2,600 meters under the seabed off the coast.
The project is to 80% funded by the Norwegian government and the transport and storage part of the Longship Project. The Longship model is a prime example to show that CCS is realizable, safe, and cost-effective. The project, including the Northern Lights part, provide a platform not only for Norwegian business, but also European businesses a crucial decarbonization option and solutions to replicate. However, Northern Lights is by itself a registered and incorporated General Partnership with Shared Liability (DA) and equally owned by Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies.
