Microsoft has signed a strategic agreement with Norwegian energy company Equinor to advance CO₂ transport and storage value chains, as well as the development of carbon removal credits, in north-western Europe and the United States.
Announcing the deal on LinkedIn, Grete Tveit, Equinor’s senior vice-president, said: “Our companies share strong ambitions within these areas. Equinor, as a major player in CO₂ transport and storage, and Microsoft, as the world’s leading procurer of CDR credits that can also provide the end-to-end digital backbone to track molecules from capture sites to permanent storage.”
The collaboration builds on an earlier partnership that included Microsoft’s commitment to the Northern Lights carbon capture and storage (CCS) project — a joint venture between Equinor, TotalEnergies and Shell.
Established in 2017, Northern Lights is the world’s first cross-border CO₂ transport and storage facility, located in the Norwegian North Sea. It forms part of Longship, Norway’s full-scale CCS programme, which aims to capture CO₂ emissions from industrial sites in the Oslo-fjord region, transport them by ship to a coastal terminal in western Norway, and then via pipeline to a subsea reservoir 2,600 metres beneath the seabed for permanent storage.
Microsoft first partnered with Northern Lights in 2020, offering digital expertise to track carbon molecules and committing to use the project as a storage partner for its European carbon removal offtakes. In July, Microsoft announced the purchase of 1.1 million tonnes of carbon removal credits from Hafslund Celsio, an energy-from-waste and CCS operator. Once operational, Hafslund Celsio’s system is expected to capture 400,000 tonnes of CO₂ annually, which will then be stored by Northern Lights.
Equinor has also been a long-term Microsoft customer, migrating its systems to the Azure cloud platform in 2019 after Microsoft launched a dedicated cloud region in Norway.
