What happened
Europe's largest industrial carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility was officially inaugurated on September 7, 2026 at Yara's ammonia and fertiliser plant in Sluiskil, in the Dutch province of Zeeland. The unit can capture and liquefy up to 800,000 tonnes of CO2 a year from ammonia production. The opening drew Dutch PM Rob Jetten, Norwegian PM Jonas Gahr Store, EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra and Yara chief executive Svein Tore Holsether.The capture is only part of it. This is Europe's first complete cross-border chain: CO2 is caught in the Netherlands, liquefied, shipped to Norway and injected under the seabed.
- Capacity - up to 800,000 tonnes of CO2 a year from ammonia production;
- Target - about 12 million tonnes over 15 years, subject to supportive policy;
- Transport - Northern Lights ships to the Oygarden terminal in Norway;
- Storage - 2.6 km beneath the seabed in the Aurora reservoir;
- Yara investment - about EUR 200 million, not the 1 billion dollars sometimes quoted.
Fig. 1. Annual CO2 capture capacity, million tonnes: Yara Sluiskil against Northern Lights, the EU 2030 target and all operational CCS projects worldwide. Data: Yara, Northern Lights, European Commission, Carbon Brief.
How the chain works
Two Northern Lights ships of about 7,200 tonnes each carry the CO2, up to two loaded voyages a week. In Norway the gas travels through a pipeline of about 100 km and is injected into the Aurora reservoir 2.6 km below the North Sea floor. Northern Lights is a joint venture of Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies and part of Norway's Longship programme. Its first phase is sized at 1.5 million tonnes a year and is fully booked; a second phase approved in 2025 should lift capacity to at least 5 million tonnes. The first cargoes came from Heidelberg Materials' cement plant in Brevik.What it costs and who pays
Some write-ups call the project Europe's most useless and put its cost at 1 billion dollars. That is not accurate. According to Yara, the net investment in the Sluiskil unit was about EUR 200 million. The storage infrastructure cost more: Norway put about NOK 22 billion into Longship, and the total programme, including 10 years of operation, is estimated at roughly NOK 34 billion. The transport leg was supported by the EU through the Connecting Europe Facility.The economics do not rest on selling a product but on avoiding costs. Capture exempts Yara from European carbon payments under the emissions trading system (ETS), and the company says the project carries a double-digit expected return before any blue premium for low-carbon products.
Why critics push back
Even 800,000 tonnes is very little on a global scale. According to Carbon Brief, all 75 operational CCS projects worldwide capture about 62.5 million tonnes a year, roughly 0.2% of global emissions. The Sluiskil unit accounts for under 0.003% of global emissions and about 0.5% of Dutch output, the core argument of critics.Campaigners at the Center for International Environmental Law call such projects a dangerous distraction that lets polluters keep emitting instead of moving away from fossil fuels. IEEFA analyst Andrew Reid says the technology remains uncertain, very expensive and dependent on heavy subsidies. E3G is softer: ammonia has a concentrated CO2 stream, one of the easier applications, and CCS should be used selectively.
⚠ IMPORTANT
The bottom line: officially this is Europe's largest CCS facility and the first working cross-border CO2 route. In practice it is a EUR 200 million project whose effect is under 0.003% of global emissions. For now its symbolic value matters more than its scale.