Yara starts CO2 capture at Dutch plant for Norway storage

Norwegian chemicals group Yara said Monday it had begun capturing part of the CO2 emitted by its ammonia and fertiliser plant in Sluiskil, the Netherlands, for underground storage in Norway.

Yara said the plant will capture 800,000 tons of CO2 a year, about 0.5 percent of the Netherlands' total annual emissions. The CO2 is to be liquefied, shipped to Norway and injected into an aquifer about 2,600 metres under the seabed off Norway's western coast.

The storage is part of the Northern Lights project, which began operating last year. Yara called the Sluiskil facility the biggest industrial carbon capture and storage project in Europe.

Yara chief executive Svein Tore Holsether said the facility showed that large-scale industrial decarbonisation was possible. EU climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra said in Yara's statement that Europe needed such projects to combine climate ambition with a strong industrial base.

Carbon capture and storage has been listed as a climate tool by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency, especially for industries such as cement and steel that are difficult to decarbonise.

The technology remains complex and costly. It is often more profitable for industrial companies to buy pollution permits on the European carbon market than to pay for capturing and storing their CO2.

Northern Lights has signed contracts with a handful of companies. It has annual CO2 storage capacity of 1.5 million tonnes, expected to rise to five million tonnes by the end of the decade.