Yara opens Europe’s largest carbon capture facility

The fertilizer maker Yara International has started operations at Europe’s largest carbon dioxide capture and sequestration (CCS) system to date. The installation, at an ammonia plant in Sluiskil, the Netherlands, will isolate and liquify up to 800,000 metric tons (t) per year of the plant’s CO₂ byproduct and store it in seven large tanks before shipping it by sea to Norway for permanent disposal via the Northern Lights carbon sequestration project.

Yara’s capture process uses aqueous methyldiethanolamine as a solvent to isolate CO₂ during the hydrogen production step of ammonia synthesis.

The cross-border supply chain for CO₂ disposal brings together a suite of chemical and energy companies. The CO₂ liquefaction equipment came from the industrial gas firm Linde, compressors were provided by the energy and logistics firm Baker Hughes, and Northern Lights is a joint venture between the energy companies Equinor, Shell, and TotalEnergies.

European chemical and energy firms have been watching Yara’s progress closely because the facility is the first large-scale deployment of an industrial decarbonization approach that other manufacturers see as a simple way to cut their carbon footprints and that some energy and industrial gas firms are exploring as a new service business.

Yara’s business model for the site relies on European policy support, including carbon taxes, says Arif Gasilov, a regulatory consultant who works on sustainability reporting and disclosure. That approach means the firm doesn’t need to find customers willing to pay a green premium for its ammonia, he says, but it makes the plant’s success dependent on those policies staying constant.

The start of CCS operations at Sluiskil is a significant step forward for the industry because it demonstrates a complete capture, transportation, and storage system, according to Cansu Doganay, an industrial decarbonization analyst at Lux Research.

The project stands out in three main ways, Doganay says. Northern Lights injected its first volumes of CO₂ about a year ago from cement makers in Norway, but Yara’s participation makes the supply chain international. Indeed, the prime ministers of both Norway and the Netherlands were on hand in Sluiskil to celebrate the achievement. The project cost $228 million, she says, which included $35 million in government support and $30 million in tax relief for Yara.

Secondly, Yara’s installation adds CCS to an existing ammonia plant, showing that the technology can work on retrofits, not just purpose-built plants. Finally, Doganay says, the project shows that the logistics work for moving CO₂ by sea to a central disposal site, reducing the need for difficult-to-build CO₂ pipelines or local geological storage wells.

But decarbonization consultant François Le Scornet says the site is an imperfect test case for the wide adoption of CCS. “The Yara Sluiskil project demonstrates that CCS can work when almost everything is in its favor,” he says. Ammonia synthesis already produces a concentrated CO₂ stream, and the plant is located on the water, which simplifies the logistics of sending the liquefied CO₂ to Northern Lights. “You won’t find such interesting conditions for most cement, steel, or power generation projects,” Le Scornet says.

Still, seeing a whole system working may give other project developers confidence. “I think the lesson there is: If the infrastructure exists in a certain region, you’re going to see that investment,” says Jessie Stolark, executive director of the industry nonprofit Carbon Capture Coalition. In the US, CCS projects are moving forward near existing CO₂ pipeline networks connected to storage such as ADM’s well in Decatur, Illinois, and ExxonMobil’s Denbury pipeline on the Gulf Coast, she says.

On Sept. 16, for example, ExxonMobil announced the start-up of carbon capture as a service at a Nucor iron smelting plant in Louisiana, one of four CCS projects it has brought online recently.

“We focus a lot on the capture side, right? And that’s the exciting piece,” Stolark says. “But if you look at where people are developing the storage and infrastructure to support offtake, that’s where there’s going to be major hubs.”