The world's first commercial service offering carbon storage off Norway's coast has carried out its inaugural CO2 injection into the North Sea seabed, the Northern Lights consortium operating the site said recently.
Northern Lights, led by oil giants Equinor, Shell, and TotalEnergies, involves transporting and burying CO2 captured at smokestacks across Europe.
The aim is to prevent emissions from being released into the atmosphere, and thereby help halt climate change.
"We now injected and stored the very first CO2 safely in the reservoir," Northern Lights' managing director Tim Heijn said in a statement.
"Our ships, facilities, and wells are now in operation."
In concrete terms, after the CO2 is captured, it is liquified and transported by ship to the Oygarden terminal near Bergen on Norway's western coast.
It is then transferred into large tanks before being injected through a 110-kilometre (68-mile) pipeline into the seabed, at a depth of around 2.6 kilometers, for permanent storage.
The first CO2 injection into the Northern Lights geological reservoir was from Germany's Heidelberg Materials cement plant in Brevik in southeastern Norway.
