By any measure, it’s a milestone: Norway’s Northern Lights project has begun injecting CO₂ 2,600 meters beneath the North Sea, receiving its first shipment from Heidelberg Materials’ Brevik cement plant and pushing the start button on Europe’s first open-access, cross-border carbon capture and storage (CCS) value chain. The owners — Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies — confirmed first injection on August 25, 2025, marking the operational start of Phase 1 (1.5 Mt/yr; ~37.5 Mt over 25 years) — already fully subscribed — and the green-lighted expansion to ≥5 Mt/yr under Phase 2.
What just happened — and why it matters
For the first time,
