Northern Lights JV receives €131mn EU funding

The Northern Lights joint venture, a collaboration between energy majors Shell, Equinor, and TotalEnergies, has secured €131mn ($141mn) in funding from the European Commission under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) scheme, it said on December 8.

“I am very happy that the European Union has proposed to grant Northern Lights with CEF-funding. This confirms Northern Lights’s role as key for reaching European climate policy objectives, including contributing to a climate-neutral economy by 2050,” said Borre Jacobsen, managing director of Northern Lights.

The Northern Lights project will transport captured CO2 from industrial sites by ship to a terminal in western Norway for temporary storage. Subsequently, the CO2 will be transported by pipeline for permanent storage in a geological reservoir 2,600m beneath the seabed. 

The CEF funding comes as part of a larger €594mn support package awarded by the EU to eight cross-border energy infrastructure projects. Notably, €480mn of this funding will go towards CO2 transport and storage projects. 

“They constitute the first building blocks of a future Europe-wide carbon value chain that are scheduled for completion before the end of the decade and are therefore expected to contribute to the EU’s 2030 decarbonisation objectives," the EU Commission said in a separate statement.