On September 7, 2026, Norwegian chemical company Yara officially inaugurated Europe’s largest industrial carbon capture facility at its Sluiskil ammonia and fertilizer plant in the Dutch province of Zeeland. The site can now capture and liquefy up to 800,000 tons of CO2 a year, drawn directly from ammonia production, before the gas is shipped across the North Sea for permanent storage beneath the Norwegian seabed. The project was officially inaugurated at Yara Sluiskil as the first complete cross-border value chain for capturing, transporting, and storing industrial CO2.
This article explains how the Yara carbon capture system works, what Northern Lights does with the liquefied gas, how the facility’s 800,000-ton annual capacity compares with other carbon capture and storage projects worldwide, and why the technology remains contested.
What Yara Inaugurated at Sluiskil
Yara Sluiskil is Europe’s largest ammonia and fertilizer plant, and its new carbon capture installation is the largest industrial CCS facility on the continent. The captured CO2 comes from the plant’s ammonia production process, where CO2 is a natural byproduct of the chemical reactions used to make ammonia.
The inauguration drew senior political figures, including Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten, and Wopke Hoekstra, the European Commissioner for Climate, Net Zero and Clean Growth. Svein Tore Holsether, president and CEO of Yara International, framed the project in industrial terms: “This is an important day for Yara and for European industry. The carbon capture facility in Sluiskil proves that large-scale industrial decarbonization is possible today. As global competition intensifies, Europe must find ways to cut emissions while keeping industry, jobs and critical value chains in Europe. That is exactly what this project is about.”
Once separated, the CO2 is liquefied on site. It is then stored temporarily in large white refrigerated tanks at the facility.
From there, purpose-built carrier vessels operated by Northern Lights take it to storage sites beneath the North Sea. Northern Lights is the Norwegian joint venture that runs this transport link.
The project is expected to capture and store around 12 million tons of CO2 over its first 15 years of operation, a projection Yara says depends on the right regulatory framework conditions remaining in place. Yara has also stated that capturing these volumes avoids the carbon costs the company would otherwise pay under Europe’s emissions trading rules.
The European Commission described the facility as a strategic investment in Europe’s industrial decarbonization, noting that the storage infrastructure was part-funded through the EU’s Connecting Europe Facility.
How the Yara Carbon Capture Process Works
The Sluiskil plant strips CO2 out of the gas streams made during ammonia production. This gas separation step works much like post-combustion carbon capture processes used at power plants, where CO2 is pulled out of exhaust gases instead of escaping up the stack.
CO2 from an ammonia plant is concentrated. That makes it cheaper to capture than the dilute CO2 in power plant flue gas or ambient air. It is one reason chemical and fertilizer plants are prime candidates for industrial carbon capture.
- Capture: CO2 is separated from the gas streams produced during ammonia production at Sluiskil.
- Liquefaction: the captured gas is cooled and compressed into liquid form on site.
- Temporary storage: liquefied CO2 is held in large refrigerated tanks at the plant.
- Shipping: Northern Lights carrier vessels transport the liquid CO2 across the North Sea to Øygarden, Norway.
- Pipeline transfer: at the Øygarden terminal, the CO2 enters a roughly 100 km pipeline heading offshore.
- Permanent storage: the CO2 is injected into the Aurora reservoir, about 2,600 meters beneath the seabed, where geological formations trap it indefinitely.
Northern Lights: Shipping CO2 to the Norwegian Seabed
Northern Lights is a joint venture owned equally by Equinor, Shell, and TotalEnergies. It runs what is described as the world’s first open-access CO2 transport and storage service. Any industrial emitter in Europe can book capacity instead of building its own storage infrastructure.
The venture’s first phase has been operational since 2024. Its inaugural cargo came from Heidelberg Materials’ cement plant at Brevik, Norway. Yara and Northern Lights signed their transport and storage agreement in 2023, and Northern Lights managing director Tim Heijn said the start of operations shows that cross-border carbon capture and storage is “a viable solution for European industry.”
Five companies have now contracted with Northern Lights: Heidelberg Materials and Celsio in Norway, Yara in the Netherlands, Ørsted in Denmark, and Stockholm Exergi in Sweden. Stockholm Exergi has signed a 15-year agreement to ship 900,000 tons of biogenic CO2 a year starting in 2028.
In March 2025, the partners took the final investment decision for Northern Lights’ second phase. The NOK 7.5 billion investment (about $700 million) will expand transport and storage capacity from 1.5 million to more than 5 million tons of CO2 a year, starting in the second half of 2028.
The expansion plan matters for Yara carbon capture economics: Sluiskil’s 800,000 tons a year fits comfortably within today’s 1.5 million-ton storage capacity, but Europe’s broader industrial decarbonization plans will need the fivefold expansion now under construction.
How Big Is 800,000 Tons? The Scale Context
Headline figures deserve context. The Global Carbon Budget 2025 projects that CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use will reach 42.2 billion tons in 2025, a rise of about 1.1 percent. Fossil fuels account for roughly 90 percent of all CO2 emissions.
Set against that backdrop, Yara’s 800,000 tons a year is roughly 0.0019 percent of a single year of global fossil fuel CO2. The project’s full 15-year target of 12 million tons equals about 0.03 percent of one year’s emissions.
Put differently: the world’s fossil fuel economy emits in about 10 minutes what Sluiskil captures in a full year. That does not make the project pointless. It makes it a template. If Europe’s cement, steel, chemical, and fertilizer sectors each replicated this kind of capture-and-ship chain, the volumes would become material, and the cross-border infrastructure being built now is what would make that replication possible.
Scaling the model exposes a different challenge. On the 42.2 billion-ton baseline cited above, matching just 2 percent of annual fossil fuel CO2 would require roughly 1,000 capture facilities the size of Sluiskil. Offsetting the full annual total would take more than 50,000. Every one of those plants would consume steel, concrete, and fuel before capturing a single ton, which is why carbon capture is generally treated as one decarbonization tool among several rather than a replacement for cutting emissions at the source.
The table below benchmarks Sluiskil against the largest carbon capture and storage infrastructure referenced in industry documentation:
| Facility | Location | Annual CO2 capacity | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yara Sluiskil CCS (capture) | Sluiskil, Netherlands | 800,000 tons/year | Inaugurated September 2026 |
| Northern Lights Phase 1 (storage) | Øygarden, Norway | 1.5 million tons/year | Operational since 2024 |
| Huaneng Longdong Energy Base CCS | Zhengning, Gansu, China | 1.5 million tons/year | Operating at 1 GW coal plant |
| Northern Lights Phase 2 (storage) | Øygarden, Norway | More than 5 million tons/year | FID March 2025, online 2028 |
Yara’s setup is Europe’s largest industrial capture facility, but the world’s biggest single capture installation remains the Huaneng Longdong Energy Base CCS project profile published by the Global CCS Institute: the Zhengning power station project in China’s Gansu Province captures 1.5 million tons of CO2 a year from a 1 GW coal-fired unit’s flue gas.
Why Carbon Capture Remains Controversial
Search interest in questions like “what is carbon capture and why is it bad” reflects a genuine debate, and critics of carbon capture technology raise several recurring objections:
- Scale: flagship projects capture a fraction of a percent of global emissions, leading some researchers to argue that CCS creates an illusion of progress.
- Cost and energy penalty: capturing, liquefying, shipping, and injecting CO2 consumes energy and capital that could alternatively fund renewables or efficiency.
- Moral hazard: fossil fuel producers have used carbon capture pledges to justify continued extraction, potentially delaying deeper cuts.
- Storage permanence: injecting CO2 underground requires monitoring over decades to confirm the gas stays trapped.
Supporters counter that some industries cannot fully electrify. Cement, steel, chemicals, and fertilizer production emit CO2 through chemical processes, not just through power use. For those sectors, capturing concentrated CO2 at the source, as Yara Sluiskil does, is one of the few decarbonization pathways available.
Major energy scenarios from the IEA and IPCC include carbon capture and storage as a complement to rapid emissions reductions, not a substitute for them.
Neither side of that debate is settled by a single project. What Sluiskil demonstrates is that the full chain, capture, cross-border transport, and permanent geological storage, can operate at industrial scale today.
Who Else Is Building Carbon Capture in Europe?
Yara Sluiskil sits within a wider European carbon capture pipeline. Norway has funded major CCS infrastructure for years, as covered in our look at Norway’s carbon capture mega-projects, and the country’s flagship CCS program, Longship, the greatest climate project in Norwegian industry, underpins the Northern Lights storage network Yara now uses.
For those asking which companies lead carbon capture globally, the operator list around Northern Lights reads like a roll call of European heavy industry: Equinor, Shell, and TotalEnergies own the storage venture, while Heidelberg Materials (cement), Celsio (waste-to-energy), Ørsted (bioenergy), and Stockholm Exergi (district heating) have booked capacity.
Shell also runs its own carbon capture plant, which passed a 4 million ton milestone months ahead of schedule. Technology suppliers such as SLB Capturi, formed as a joint venture with Aker Carbon Capture’s capture business, and direct air capture pioneer Climeworks represent other corners of the market, alongside firms exploring uses for captured gas, a space covered in our look at companies converting CO2 emissions into useful products.
China, meanwhile, operates large capture volumes at coal power and industrial sites. The Huaneng Longdong project alone captures nearly double Sluiskil’s annual amount. The global picture is not a race between single mega-projects. It is a gradual build-out of shared infrastructure, exactly what Northern Lights’ expansion to 5 million tons a year by 2028 represents.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the meaning of carbon capture?
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) refers to technologies that separate CO2 from industrial gas streams. The CO2 is compressed into a liquid, transported, and injected into deep geological formations, where rock layers trap it permanently.
In the Yara Sluiskil carbon capture chain, the CO2 is separated from ammonia production gases. It does not come from smokestack exhaust or ambient air.
Which country is the Yara company from?
Yara International ASA is a Norwegian company, founded in Norway in 1905 and headquartered in Oslo. It operates in over 60 countries and employs about 15,700 people. Although Yara’s carbon capture made headlines at its Sluiskil plant in the Netherlands, the company itself is Norwegian, and its captured CO2 is stored in Norwegian waters beneath the North Sea seabed.
Who are the top carbon capture companies?
There is no single definitive ranking, but the most prominent carbon capture companies include the Northern Lights joint venture (Equinor, Shell, TotalEnergies), industrial gas separation specialists such as SLB Capturi, direct air capture firms like Climeworks, and industrial emitters building their own capture chains, such as Heidelberg Materials, Ørsted, and Yara. The Global CCS Institute maintains public facility profiles for major projects worldwide.
Is Yara fertilizer of good quality?
Yara is one of the world’s largest fertilizer producers, and assessments of product quality depend on independent agronomic testing rather than on this facility’s carbon capture credentials. What the Sluiskil project changes is the carbon footprint of production, supporting lower-carbon fertilizer lines such as the company’s Yara Climate Choice range, rather than the fertilizer’s agronomic performance itself.
Why is carbon capture considered controversial?
Critics argue that carbon capture is expensive, energy-intensive, captures only a tiny share of global emissions, and risks prolonging fossil fuel dependence. Supporters argue that hard-to-abate industries like cement, steel, and chemicals have few other decarbonization options and that projects like Yara Sluiskil prove the transport and storage chain works at an industrial scale. Most mainstream climate scenarios include CCS as a complement to, not a replacement for, deep emissions cuts.
Conclusion: A Template, Not a Silver Bullet
The Yara carbon capture facility at Sluiskil matters less for its volume than for what it proves. Europe’s first complete cross-border CCS chain now operates commercially, capturing 800,000 tons of CO2 a year and storing it 2,600 meters beneath the Norwegian seabed.
With Northern Lights expanding to more than 5 million tons of storage capacity by 2028, the infrastructure for replicating this model across Europe’s heavy industry is being laid today. Whether carbon capture scales fast enough to matter for the climate will depend on policy, carbon pricing, and how quickly other industrial emitters follow Yara’s lead.
