Europe has opened its largest industrial carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility at Yara International’s Sluiskil ammonia and fertilizer plant in the Netherlands. The facility was officially inaugurated on September 7, 2026, marking a major step for Europe’s push to reduce emissions from heavy industry.
Yara expects the site to capture and liquefy up to 800,000 metric tons of CO2 per year from ammonia production. The captured carbon will then be shipped to Norway and permanently stored beneath the North Sea.
Over 15 years, the project is expected to capture and store about 12 million tons of CO2. The European Commission announced that this project is the largest commercial CCS facility in Europe. It is also one of the first complete cross-border systems for capturing, transporting, and permanently storing industrial CO2.
The project matters beyond Yara. It shows how captured industrial emissions could be moved across borders to storage sites, creating a model that other hard-to-abate industries could use. Svein Tore Holsether, President and CEO of Yara International, remarked:
“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.”
Capturing 800,000 Tons of CO2 Each Year
Yara’s Sluiskil site is one of Europe’s largest ammonia and fertilizer production facilities. Ammonia production generates process emissions that are difficult to eliminate through renewable power alone.
The new CCS system captures CO2 from the ammonia production process before it reaches the atmosphere. The gas is then compressed and liquefied at the Dutch site for transport.
Yara says the project can capture up to 800,000 tons of CO2 annually, equal to roughly 0.5% of the Netherlands’ annual emissions. This is based on the company’s earlier comparison with 2022 national emissions.
The system is designed to operate as part of a wider transport and storage chain rather than as a standalone capture project. That distinction is important because capturing CO2 is only the first step. The carbon must also be transported safely and stored permanently.
Captured CO2 Will Travel From the Netherlands to Norway
After capture and liquefaction, the CO2 will be loaded onto ships operated by Northern Lights, the Norwegian CO2 transport and storage company.
The carbon will travel to Øygarden on Norway’s western coast. From there, Northern Lights will transport it through pipelines and inject it about 2,600 meters beneath the seabed on the Norwegian continental shelf.
Yara’s project will use two ships, each capable of carrying about 7,200 tons of liquefied CO2. The company previously outlined a schedule of up to two loaded ships per week.
The project is significant because it creates a cross-border CCS chain linking an industrial emitter in one country with a geological storage site in another.
Northern Lights is part of Norway’s Longship CCS program. Norway’s government has committed about NOK 22 billion in support for construction and operation of Longship. The total estimated cost of the broader project, including 10 years of operation, is about NOK 34 billion.
Longship’s first phase has an annual CO2 storage capacity of 1.5 million tons, with plans to expand to 5 million tons in a second phase. It already has agreements with Yara in the Netherlands, Ørsted in Denmark, and Stockholm Exergi in Sweden.
CCS Offers Heavy Industry a New Route to Cut Emissions
The fertilizer industry faces a difficult decarbonization challenge. Ammonia is essential for fertilizer production, but conventional ammonia manufacturing relies heavily on fossil fuels and also creates process emissions.
Electrification and low-carbon hydrogen can reduce some emissions, but they require major changes in energy supply and industrial processes. CCS can address emissions that are harder to remove through efficiency or renewable energy alone.
The European Commission has identified CCS as an important tool for industries such as chemicals, cement and waste management. It says Europe needs to be ready to capture at least 50 million tons of CO2 annually by 2030. That requirement could rise to around 280 million tons by 2040 and approximately 450 million tons by 2050.
The EU has also set a legally binding target of at least 50 million tons of annual CO2 injection capacity by 2030 under the Net-Zero Industry Act.
Source: Clean Air Task Force
Against that target, Yara’s 800,000-ton annual capture capacity represents about 1.6% of the EU’s 2030 storage-injection goal. The comparison is not a direct measure of total emissions reduction because the EU target refers to injection capacity, while Yara’s figure refers to capture capacity. Still, it shows why projects at this scale are becoming important pieces of Europe’s carbon-management infrastructure.
CCS Meets Europe’s Carbon Pricing Market
The Sluiskil project is not a conventional carbon removal project. That distinction matters. The facility captures industrial process CO2 that would otherwise enter the atmosphere. It does not directly remove CO2 that was already in the atmosphere.
Under the EU’s carbon management framework, CCS can cover fossil, biogenic or atmospheric CO2, while permanent removals generally refer to CO2 captured from atmospheric or biogenic sources.
The immediate financial incentive for Yara is therefore linked to avoiding emissions and the cost of carbon allowances rather than generating a traditional voluntary carbon credit.
Yara says capturing and permanently storing the emissions will allow the company to avoid carbon taxation on the captured volumes. EU legislation also provides rules under the EU Emissions Trading System for captured CO2 that is transferred for permanent geological storage.
This creates an important connection between CCS infrastructure and Europe’s carbon pricing market.
As the EU ETS carbon price increases over time, the economic value of permanently storing industrial emissions can also increase. At the same time, the cost of capture, liquefaction, shipping, and storage remains an important factor in determining whether projects are commercially attractive.
Yara’s 2026 Capital Markets Day materials put the Sluiskil project’s net investment at about $200 million. It further reported that the project was 75% complete at the time of the presentation. Yara also described the project as having a double-digit expected internal rate of return before the blue premium.
Yara Is Linking CCS to Its Wider Climate Strategy
The Sluiskil project is part of Yara’s broader emissions reduction strategy. According to its 2025 Annual Report, Yara reduced its scope 1 and 2 emissions by 17% against its stated baseline by 2025. Its greenhouse gas emissions intensity reached 2.7 tons of CO2e per ton of nitrogen, meeting its 2025 target.
Source: Yara
Yara has a target to reduce absolute scope 1 and 2 emissions by 30% by 2030 from a 2019 baseline. It also has a 2030 target to reduce scope 3 emissions from the use of sold products by 11.1% from a 2021 baseline.
Source: Yara
The company reported $15.7 billion in revenue in 2025 and operates in more than 60 countries. For Yara, CCS therefore serves two purposes:
reducing emissions from an existing industrial site and supporting the company’s longer-term effort to lower the carbon intensity of fertilizer production.
Putting Europe’s Carbon Strategy to the Test
Yara’s Sluiskil facility arrives at a critical point for Europe’s climate and industrial policy. The EU wants to rapidly expand carbon storage while protecting energy-intensive industries from rising carbon costs and international competition. The challenge is turning that ambition into commercially viable infrastructure.
The Sluiskil project provides a real-world test. It combines industrial capture, liquefaction, maritime transport and permanent geological storage across national borders.
The project also highlights an important point for carbon markets: not every tonne of CO2 permanently stored will become a tradable carbon removal credit. In this case, the main climate benefit comes from preventing industrial emissions from entering the atmosphere and allowing the emitter to manage its obligations under Europe’s carbon pricing system.
For Europe’s hard-to-abate industries, however, that could prove just as important as the growth of carbon removal markets.