Northern Lights JV orders LNG-fuelled CO2 carriers

Norway's Equinor and its partners in the Northern Lights carbon storage project announced on October 11 they had ordered two CO₂ carriers from the Dalian Shipbuilding Industry yard in China that will use LNG as their primary fuel.

The vessels, due for delivery by mid-2024, will also feature wind-assisted propulsion systems and air lubrication technology, in order to reduces their CO₂ intensity by a further 34%. The Northern Lights consortium, which also includes Shell and TotalEnergies, said the ships were the first of their kind.

"The use of ships will enable the development of a flexible and efficient European infrastructure network for transport of CO₂ captured by our industrial customers, keeping costs as low as possible to help decarbonisation scale up," Northern Lights' managing director Borre Jacobsen said.

The ships, each with a cargo size of 7,500 m³, will handle liquefied CO₂ from European emitters and deliver it to a receiving terminal in Oygarden in west Norway. From there, the CO₂ will be piped offshore to an aquifer some 3 km under the seabed.

Described by Norway's government as the country's greatest ever climate project, Northern Lights will have an initial storage capacity of only 1.5mn mt/yr, receiving CO₂ from a cement plant and a waste-to-energy station in Norway. But its capacity is set to be expanded under a second stage to more than 5mn mt/yr, as it takes on additional customers in Norway and elsewhere in Europe.

The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate recently estimated that the country's continental shelf potentially could sequester 1,000 years of national CO₂ emissions. Norway has one of the lowest carbon intensities in the world, in part because it sources most of its power from hydroelectric plants.