Northern Lights awards third ship building contract

Northern Lights, a carbon capture and storage (CCS) project in Norway, has awarded a shipbuilding contract to China’s Dalian Shipbuilding Offshore Co. (DSOC) for its third CO₂ ship, it announced on September 1.

The contract covers the construction of a 7,500 m³ vessel that will be used to transport liquefied CO₂ from industrial emitters to the Northern Lights receiving facilities in Oygarden, Norway.

The ship will be built at the DSOC shipyard in Dalian, China, where the first two ships are currently under construction. It is expected to be delivered in 2025. The third ship will be equipped with the same technologies as the first two ships, including LNG fuel, a wind-assisted propulsion system, and air lubrication. These technologies will help to reduce the carbon intensity of the shipping operation, Northern Lights said.

“We are very pleased to announce that we are increasing our shipping capacity,” said Borre Jacobsen, managing director of Northern Lights. “Our shipping solution is scalable and provides the necessary flexibility to service industrial emitters across Europe. The award of a ship building contract for a third ship is a response to an increasing demand for cross-border CO₂ transport and storage.”

Northern Lights is a joint venture owned by Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies. The joint venture is developing the world’s first open-source CO₂ transport and storage infrastructure in Norway. The project will help in decarbonisation of industrial emissions and facilitate the removal of CO₂ from the air.

The joint venture will transport CO₂ from capture sites by ship to a terminal in western Norway for intermediate storage, before being transported by pipeline for permanent storage in a reservoir 2,600 m under the seabed.