Norway's Northern Lights project is now operating as the world's first commercial subsea carbon storage hub. The joint venture between Equinor, Shell, and TotalEnergies plans to store up to 109 million tons of CO2 in saline aquifers more than 2,500 meters below the seabed. Liquid CO2 from cement plants, waste-to-energy facilities, and chemical makers is shipped to onshore terminals, then injected for permanent storage. The project gives heavy industry in Northern Europe a cross-border route for captured emissions, with open access for third-party emitters. It also signals a shift from pilot-scale CCS to utility-scale service. The business case is tied to EU ETS allowance prices, so the next test is whether industrial demand and injection capacity grow fast enough to match the planned expansion.
