By Abbas Nazil
Norwegian chemical company Yara inaugurated Europe’s largest industrial carbon capture plant at its ammonia and fertilizer facility in Sluiskil, Netherlands.
The newly launched facility is designed to capture up to 800,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually directly from its ammonia manufacturing operations.
Once captured, the carbon dioxide gas is liquified and temporarily stored on-site in large insulated tanks before transport.
Norwegian transport firm Northern Lights then ships the liquified gas to Norway for permanent storage in a reservoir located 8,530 feet beneath the seabed.
This commercial carbon capture and storage project represents a major operational step toward industrial decarbonization across the European continent.
Over its projected 15-year operational lifecycle, the Sluiskil plant is expected to capture and permanently store approximately 12 million tons of carbon dioxide.
While significant for regional industry, the plant’s annual capacity of 800,000 tons represents approximately 0.5 percent of total annual Dutch greenhouse gas emissions.
Global fossil fuel emissions remain vast, with total worldwide atmospheric carbon output exceeding 42 billion tons annually.
To accommodate growing industrial demand across Europe, Northern Lights is expanding its offshore storage capacity from 1.5 million tons to 5 million tons per year.
Decarbonization efforts are increasingly targeting heavy industrial sectors such as cement, steel, chemical, and fertilizer production through carbon capture technologies.
Although Yara’s facility represents the largest installation in Europe, larger global projects exist, including China’s Huaneng Longdong Energy Base project.
That facility, operating at a coal-fired power station in Gansu Province, possesses the capacity to capture 1.5 million tons of carbon dioxide annually from flue gas.
