Yara, Ørsted, and the €200/ton Mirage: What Northern Lights Actually Teaches Us About CCS

Join CleanTechnica’s Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott’s in-depth analyses and excessive stage summaries, join our day by day e-newsletter, and/or observe us on Google Information!

Northern Lights, Europe’s flagship cross-border carbon seize and storage challenge, is now able to obtain carbon dioxide for sequestration, with the primary ships within the water and anticipated to start out delivering waste gasoline from prospects this 12 months. It’s being celebrated as a triumph of local weather management and engineering.

However whenever you dig into the economics, coverage scaffolding, and know-how selections—particularly as revealed by subscriber habits and price buildings—it turns into clear that this isn’t a scalable mannequin for decarbonization. It’s a extremely sponsored, narrowly relevant resolution constructed for a particular political second.

Three articles I revealed on CleanTechnica hint the story from a number of angles: who signed up and why, the shaky maritime transport assumptions, and the geology and operational particulars of the Johansen formation sequestration website. Collectively they reveal a system that works, however solely simply—and just for a particular sliver of emitters with uncommon traits or beneficiant authorities assist.

Let’s begin with the subscriber listing. Yara’s ammonia facility in Sluiskil produces a extremely pure stream of CO₂ as a byproduct, making seize comparatively low cost and simple. Norcem’s cement plant at Brevik has been lavished with Norwegian subsidies for years. Celsio’s waste-to-energy plant in Oslo operates in a politically delicate city zone and has political capital to burn. Ørsted’s bioenergy with carbon seize and storage (BECCS) operations are within the combine too, leveraging the phantasm of net-negative emissions to justify important expenditure. (A fast notice: the primary article asserted that Exergi was in part one, however it seems it’s the one dedicated buyer for part 2. Mea culpa.) Each one in every of these companies both has a pure CO₂ stream, direct authorities backing, or each. This isn’t a know-how successful on its deserves. It’s a coalition of comfort surviving on subsidies and exceptionalism.

Then there’s the delivery section. CO₂ is being liquefied and loaded onto custom-built ships for a voyage to the Øygarden terminal in Norway, the place it’s pumped into underground reservoirs. That may sound elegant, however it’s a logistical home of playing cards. The ships are sluggish, the home windows for docking are slender, and the financial case is barely believable even with a long time of upstream oil and gasoline infrastructure experience behind it. The delivery price alone is estimated at round €27 per ton. That is likely to be manageable now, however it’s uncovered to volatility in gas costs, labor, climate threat, and the price of vessel building and upkeep. There’s additionally the truth that CO₂ is a heavy, low-value cargo. Attempt to scale this and also you’ll hit port bottlenecks and ballooning operational prices lengthy earlier than you hit local weather relevance.

The ultimate leg of the journey—into the Johansen formation—is technically competent. The reservoir has good porosity, the caprock is stable, and the injection wellhead is constructed with Statoil’s typical North Sea rigor. Nevertheless it’s additionally a fossil footprint monument. All the things in regards to the website—from the seabed pipeline to the storage dome—is a retrofitted fossil gas asset. This isn’t the way you decarbonize an economic system; that is the way you lengthen its tailpipe.

What does this imply for prices? The breakdown for the 5 Part 1 subscribers is instructive. Seize prices vary from €50 to €150 per ton, relying on course of purity and know-how. Delivery provides one other €30. Sequestration one other €30. That places the full price per ton of CO₂ saved at about €107 for Yara, €207 for Norcem and Celsio, and €157 and €167 for Ørsted (the Avedøre plant is trucking liquid CO2 100 km in about 30 truck masses each day pending a pipeline which can doubtless by no means be constructed). These should not trivial sums. They’re effectively above the EU ETS carbon worth, which implies that none of those would proceed with out direct public subsidies, price pass-through to captive prospects, or an elaborate accounting scheme that inflates the worth of “damaging” emissions.

That brings us to Joe Romm and BECCS. Romm has lengthy been one of many clearest-eyed analysts of carbon coverage and power applied sciences, and his latest 2023 paper dismantles the case for BECCS with forensic readability. He paperwork how all the BECCS idea rests on heroic assumptions: that biomass is really sustainable and net-zero, that seize could be executed effectively at small, distributed biomass websites, and that long-term sequestration really works at scale. He reveals how BECCS not solely diverts coverage and funding away from actual decarbonization, but additionally opens up harmful land-use pressures that displace meals, ecosystems, and folks. The essential perception is easy: BECCS is an phantasm baked into fashions like these from the IPCC not as a result of it really works, however as a result of it makes the maths of overshoot eventualities look higher. In actuality, the logistics, economics, and land-use conflicts render it an implausible local weather resolution. Romm’s twentieth anniversary version of his guide The Hype About Hydrogen will probably be delivery on Earth Day, so preorder your copy know.

And but right here we’re—Europe’s most celebrated carbon storage challenge is being bankrolled by BECCS prospects. It’s the epitome of Romm’s warning: a fancy, costly, and unsure system being legitimized by the promise of damaging emissions that will by no means materialize. The irony, in fact, is that the identical governments subsidizing this effort are additionally dragging their toes on grid interconnection, warmth pump deployment, and direct electrification of business processes—the very issues that might ship near-term, low-cost, scalable decarbonization.

There’s one other lesson or two to attract out of this. Yara is actually the absolute best case for CCS. Its course of emissions from steam reformation of methane are very pure, making seize as low cost because it will get. It’s proper on the water, so its CO2 doesn’t must transit any densely populated neighborhoods, one thing that’s more likely to cease all CO2 pipelines of their tracks. The top to finish system is closely sponsored. But it nonetheless prices over €100 per ton for waste disposal. Consider all of the crops in Europe that don’t have these circumstances of success.

Additional, Johansen formation is near shore and comparatively shallow. 100 km of pipelines underneath the water after which two kilometers down weren’t remotely low cost, however that is about as low cost as offshore sequestration websites are going to be. The delivery part provides plenty of prices per ton, however frankly offshore websites additional away are going to see so much larger prices per ton for sequestration.

As I famous in my international evaluation and projection of cement decarbonization from a 12 months in the past, I’ve lengthy held that CCS would possibly pencil out for cement, underneath two or three circumstances. The primary is that the waste stream be purer CO2 resulting from electrification of limestone kilns, lowering the price of seize. I pointed to Elegant Methods’ electrochemical strategy and its 10 bar, chilly stream of CO2 from turning limestone into quicklime as making that even higher and cheaper. And I mentioned that the sequestration website needed to be both very near the cement plant or the cement plant needed to be waterside with a pipeline to offshore sequestration. These are the necessities for it to pencil out. If you happen to take a look at Norcem’s €207 per ton regardless of huge subsidies from starting to finish of the CCS chain, it ought to change into clear that there is no such thing as a financial mannequin with out subsidies.

Northern Lights shouldn’t be a failure. It’s a functioning demonstration of what you are able to do with limitless capital, political will, and geological fortune. Nevertheless it’s not a mannequin for international local weather motion. It’s a showcase of what occurs when fossil legacy programs are given a second act underneath the inexperienced highlight, and when techno-fixes displace structural reform. Actual decarbonization doesn’t sail in tankers full of gasoline. It comes from altering the system so we don’t pump out the waste gasoline within the first place.