Northern Lights has chartered a second 12,000m3 liquefied carbon dioxide carrier from a MISC and K LINE consortium. The vessel will transport captured CO2 from European industrial sites to permanent offshore storage in Norway. This expansion supports a larger goal to increase storage capacity from 1.5 million tonnes per year to over five million tonnes by the end of the decade. The project already handles emissions from cement plants and wastewater treatment facilities.
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Another ship for the Northern Lights project. It is good to see the transport side of CCS actually scaling, as that is usually where these projects hit a bottleneck.
Scaling the fleet is one thing, but I wonder about the loading infrastructure at the industrial hubs. Do they have the liquefaction capacity to keep these ships full, or are we just adding hulls to a slow pipeline?
The cement plant example is the most practical part of this. You cannot electrify a kiln away. Shipping the CO2 is a blunt tool, but it is one of the few options for heavy industry.
The open access model here is the interesting part. If Northern Lights can standardize the transport and storage fee, it lowers the risk for smaller industrial players who cannot build their own pipelines.
