The Netherlands has launched Europe's largest industrial carbon capture facility at Yara's fertilizer plant in Sluiskil. The site will capture 800,000 tons of CO2 per year from ammonia production, liquefy it, and ship it to Norway for permanent storage 8,530 feet under the seabed. The project is expected to store about 12 million tons over 15 years, making it a significant test case for industrial carbon capture in Europe. This project works because fertilizer and ammonia production generate relatively pure CO2 streams, which are cheaper to capture than emissions from cement or steel. It is part of a wider European effort to build out carbon transport and storage infrastructure, with Northern Lights expanding capacity from 1.5 to 5 million tons annually. While the site is smaller than China's Huaneng Longdong project, which captures 1.5 million tons per year, it shows that capture, shipping, and storage can operate at scale. The key challenge now is scaling up pipelines, ships, and monitoring to meet the demand from hard-to-abate industries.
