HeidelbergCement signs agreement with Equinor for CCS project

HeidelbergCement and Norway’s Group Equinor have signed a memorandum of understanding regarding the capture and storage of CO₂ (CCS).

The Norwegian government’s "Northern Lights" CCS plan has begun in three different industrial sectors and will see captured CO₂ emissions begin to be transported to empty oil and gas fields beneath the North Sea in 2023 for permanent storage. The project includes HeidelbergCement’s Brevik plant which was selected by the government for an industrial-scale CO₂ capture trial at the start of 2018, having been running its own dedicated CO₂ storage project since 2011.

The agreement signed with Equinor is a further step towards realising the overall CCS project, according to a press release. It includes looking at the possibility of CO₂ capture at other plants, while also seeing both companies work together to optimise the CO₂ transport chain and strive to implement CCS as a Europe-wide solution.

"At our Brevik cement plant, we have shown that we are able to capture carbon dioxide at an industrial scale," says Bernd Scheifele, chairman of the board. "Our CCS project is currently the most technically mature in the cement industry. We plan to capture around 400,000t of CO₂ per year at Brevik, which corresponds to around 50 per cent of the plant’s total carbon emissions."