Climeworks and Northern Lights to jointly explore direct air capture and CO₂ storage in Norway

Climeworks and Northern Lights have agreed to explore the realisation of a full-chain CO₂ removal project in Norway

Climeworks and Northern Lights have agreed to explore realisation of a full-chain CO₂ removal project in Norway, including possible use of the Northern Lights facilities as part of new negative emission solutions, addressing the need of companies in non-industrial sectors to become carbon neutral and/or carbon negative.

Climeworks is a world leading company in the field of direct air capture. Its technology runs exclusively on renewable energy and waste heat and the modular collectors can be stacked to build machines of almost any size. Climeworks’ direct air capture technology can reach a net CO₂ removal efficiency of more than 90%, taking into account full life-cycle emissions.

Beyond its existing collaboration with Carbfix in Iceland, where the captured CO₂ is mineralised in basalt, Climeworks is looking globally for other opportunities for safe and permanent CO₂ storage including in regions without basaltic bedrocks. Northern Lights provides ideal conditions for deep geological CO₂ storage in its offshore saline aquifer under the North Sea.

Northern Lights delivers carbon storage as a service to enable the decarbonisation of industrial process emissions and to facilitate the removal of CO₂ from the air.  The project includes capture of CO₂ from industrial point sources in the Oslo-fjord region, which is then shipped to an onshore terminal on the Norwegian west coast. From there, the liquefied CO₂ will be transported by pipeline to an offshore storage location 2,600 metres below the seabed in the North Sea for safe and permanent storage.

In this way direct air capture enables carbon negative operations using the Northern Lights infrastructure, contributing to Norwegian and European organizations’ and businesses’ net zero ambitions. Norway has one of Europe's leading renewable energy grids, enabling constant access to renewable energy for Climeworks' direct air capture plants.

Key take-aways

• CO₂ removal technologies are essential for the world to reach its climate targets
• Climeworks’ direct air capture technology combined with permanent storage is one of the most scalable forms of CO₂ removal.
• The collaboration with Northern Lights, which offers safe and permanent storage as a service, marks an important milestone in the direction of commercialising critical climate technology