They’ve done it! Best wishes are due to the Heidelberg Materials Norcem Brevik cement plant and everyone else involved. Today it has officially inaugurated its carbon capture and storage unit. The world’s first full-scale carbon capture facility in the cement industry is live.
The launch of the Longship project has been a two-day affair in Norway hosted by the Norwegian Ministry of Energy, Heidelberg Materials, Northern Lights and other stakeholders. Tuesday 17 June 2025 saw assorted speakers across government and industry, including Heidelberg Materials’ CEO Dominik von Achten, talk about net zero, carbon capture, CO2 markets and more at the Norwegian National Opera & Ballet in Oslo. Then the event moved to the Brevik cement plant, today on Wednesday 18 June 2025, to inaugurate the project led by HRH Crown Prince Haakon of Norway. Our editorial director Robert McCaffrey has been in attendance and a full write-up will be available in the September 2025 issue of Global Cement Magazine.
Completing the CCS project at Brevik is undeniably a major achievement. Heidelberg Materials in Norway started seriously thinking about carbon capture in the 2000s and then tested four different potential carbon capture technologies at Brevik in the 2010s. A feasibility study, concept study and a FEED study followed for the use of an amine technology approach. A full-scale capture unit on one of the plant’s two production lines was then approved for funding partly by the Norwegian government in late 2020. Technically this is a gross simplification because the project team at Brevik have worked through the technical challenges of connecting a cement production environment to a petrochemical one. 400,00t/yr of CO2 has started to be captured at Brevik and transported by ship, as part of the Northern Lights project, for sequestration under the North Sea. Heidelberg Materials then intends to sell a net-zero cement product via carbon capture around Europe called EvoZero using a carbon accounting system to manage it. When Global Cement asked about plans for EvoZero, Von Achten said production of the product is fully sold-out for 2025. “Customers are not the issue,” said von Achten. “Property developers and architects are leading the discussion on the use of EvoZero.” The age of commercially-available cement made using carbon capture has begun.
The Norwegian government estimates that the entire Longship project will cost around Euro2.6bn with Euro1.8bn attributable to the state. The original white paper proposed to the Norwegian parliament estimated that the Norcem project would cost just under Euro400m for construction and 10-years of operation. 84% of this would be paid for by state aid. Northern Lights, the CO₂ transport and storage part of Longship, had an estimated cost of Euro1.2bn, with 73% of this funding attributable to the state. Heidelberg Materials acknowledged the scale of the government grant funding it received in its 2024 financial report. It received Euro110m in government grants in 2024 with Euro77m for the Brevik project and a further Euro21m for a carbon capture, utilisation and storage project in Edmonton, Canada.
As discussed recently in Global Cement Weekly in response to the US government cutting funding for cement carbon capture projects, net zero is a deeply political issue because governments either have to pay for it directly, set-up incentives such as carbon taxes to encourage society to pay for it or ignore it and cope with the consequences. European policy is encouraging these projects so far. However, this is not necessarily the case elsewhere in the world. And governments can change their minds. The rough figures shown above about the cost of Brevik’s carbon capture unit and the costs of moving the CO2 onwards show how expensive this is.
From here it’s all about building experience on how running an industrial-scale carbon capture operation actually works in the cement sector year in, year out. This will be an exercise across multiple disciplines including engineering, the logistics of CO2 transportation and sequestration, dealing with state-level partners on a long-term basis and more besides. Many more cement sector carbon capture projects are following in Europe. They will all be eager to learn from the first one in Norway, from both the good and the bad. We will leave the last word to Von Achten from today’s inauguration, "Personally I love the collaboration part of it because this is a masterpiece of national, European, in fact, global collaboration… These days this is important."
