From Storage to Feedstock: Why CO₂ Carriers Matter for Power-to-X

A ship with “Liquefied CO₂” painted along its hull, propelled by LNG, used to be a designer’s rendering. It is now a fact at sea. Since late 2024 the first purpose-built liquefied-CO₂ carriers have entered service, and in August 2025 the Northern Lights project on Norway’s west coast began injecting captured carbon into a reservoir around 2,600 metres beneath the seabed — the world’s first full-scale commercial service for transporting and storing CO₂ as a product.

For most readers that is a carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS) story. For Power-to-X it is something more interesting: the quiet emergence of a market for moving CO₂ around.

What is actually sailing

Northern Lights — a joint venture of Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies, and the transport-and-storage pillar of Norway’s state-backed Longship programme — now runs a small fleet of liquefied-CO₂ (LCO₂) carriers. Three 7,500 m³ vessels (Northern Pioneer, Northern Pathfinder and Northern Phoenix) have been delivered since late 2024; a fourth was christened in May 2026, and larger 12,000 m³ ships are on order with consortia led by “K” Line, MISC and Mitsui O.S.K. Lines. They run on LNG and carry rotor sails and air lubrication to trim their own emissions — the detail the image above captures almost prophetically.

The ships load liquefied CO₂ from emitters and deliver it to a receiving terminal at Øygarden in western Norway, from where a pipeline takes it offshore for permanent storage. The early customer list reads like a cross-section of European industry: Heidelberg Materials’ cement plant in Brevik and the Hafslund Celsio waste-to-energy plant in Oslo at home, plus cross-border volumes contracted with Yara in the Netherlands, Ørsted in Denmark and Stockholm Exergi in Sweden.

The molecule does not care where it is going

Here is the part that rarely makes the headline. Every link in that chain — capture, liquefaction, dockside handling, the vessels themselves — is being built to put carbon underground. But it is almost exactly the infrastructure Power-to-X needs to do the opposite: to use carbon.

A synthetic fuel is, at its core, renewable hydrogen combined with CO₂. The European Commission lists ships — alongside pipelines, rail and trucks — as one of the ways CO₂ travels from where it is captured to where it is stored or used. The “used” pathway is still small: the IEA estimates that, of all announced projects, only around eight million tonnes of CO₂ a year are headed for synthetic-fuel production by 2030. But the same liquid in the same tank can be delivered to an eFuel plant just as easily as to a depleted gas field.

That is the strategic shift worth noting. As a liquid-CO₂ market takes shape, captured carbon stops being something you can only use next to the chimney that produced it. It becomes transportable, tradeable feedstock — and feedstock logistics is one of the quiet bottlenecks of the entire Power-to-X build-out.

One caveat that decides everything

This is where discipline matters. A CO₂ carrier is neutral about its cargo: it will ship fossil CO₂ to storage and biogenic CO₂ to a fuel plant with equal indifference. The climate outcome depends entirely on the input. Not only CO₂ of biogenic or atmospheric origin, combined with electricity from renewables, yields a genuinely defossilised fuel. Fossil CO₂ turned into fuel that is later burned does more than just postponing an emission; it does avoid net emissions. European rules do not encode this — under current regulation, e-fuels made from fossil CO₂ will no longer count towards the required emission savings after 2041. This, despite the fact that it costs a lot more money and energy to capture the same CO₂ molecule from the atmosphere that you could have captured also from its source. The red line should be drawn where CO₂ capture creates a business case for burning fossil carbon sources. As long as that is not the case, CCU should be allowed.

The point is one we make often at SPIN: the problem was never combustion, and never the carbon molecule itself. The problem is the increase of CO₂ in the atmosphere. A system that recycles CO₂ into fuels, and permanently stores the unavoidable remainder, is not a contradiction. It is one logistics network doing two complementary jobs.

Why Switzerland should watch the docks

Switzerland has no offshore storage of its own and a landscape of dispersed CO₂ sources — waste-to-energy plants, cement works, biogas — rather than a handful of giant emitters. That makes a European CO₂ transport market directly relevant to Swiss interests: it will help decide whether Swiss biogenic CO₂ becomes feedstock for domestic and European synthetic-fuel production, or is simply exported to a hole in the North Sea. The utilisation route is already real on Swiss soil. Limeco produces e-methane from a sewage biogas source.

The carrier in the photograph, then, is more than a CCS milestone. It is a sign that carbon is becoming a commodity with its own ships, terminals and contracts. The open question — for Switzerland and for Power-to-X — is whether the carbon those ships carry ends up buried, or turned back into fuel. At SPIN we will keep tracking exactly this convergence of carbon logistics and synthetic-fuel value chains, because the infrastructure being laid down now will shape which answer becomes the default.