Brevik CCS — Heidelberg Materials Carbon Capture Facility

Cement’s carbon problem is chemistry, not fuel. Roughly two thirds of a kiln’s emissions come off the limestone itself, which means no amount of electrification touches it. Brevik is the first place anyone has built an industrial-scale answer into a working cement plant. The capture unit takes 400,000 tonnes of CO2 a year off the kiln at Heidelberg Materials’ Brevik works, about half the plant’s emissions, and it runs on waste heat from the cement process rather than a separate energy supply.

Project Scope

The amine-based capture train was retrofitted into a plant that has made cement on the same site since 1919, which constrained every piece of the layout. SLB Capturi, the joint venture of Aker Carbon Capture and SLB, delivered the technology and the plant, with Aker Solutions supporting construction execution and Everllence supplying CO2 compression. Captured CO2 is liquefied, shipped, and stored permanently under the North Sea through the Northern Lights facility. Brevik is the anchor industrial capture project of Norway’s state-backed Longship programme, whose full cost including ten years of operation runs around NOK 34 billion, with the government contributing roughly NOK 22 billion in construction and operating grants. The Brevik capture plant itself was estimated at about NOK 3.3 billion. Parliament approved Longship in December 2020, site work started in January 2021, the first major process equipment arrived in May 2022, SLB Capturi declared construction complete in December 2024, and Crown Prince Haakon inaugurated the facility on 18 June 2025.

Why It Matters

Every low-carbon cement roadmap published in the last five years assumes capture at the kiln somewhere after 2030. Brevik is the plant those roadmaps were describing, four years early, and it exists because a government paid for most of it. The economics are not yet universal; the engineering now is. Anyone specifying a capture retrofit on an operating kiln has a reference plant to point at.

Project Team & Details