Lessons Learned From CCS Project

By Felicity Landon

From Issue 2, 2024 of Breakbulk Magazine, we explore some of the creative solutions deployed to overcome the myriad challenges of building the first-ever industrial-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) project at a cement production plant in Brevik, Norway.

(5-min read)


Towards the end of last year, the European Union agreed “unprecedented” funding for eight cross-border energy infrastructure projects, with five out of the eight being CO2 transport and storage initiatives expected to be completed by 2030.

Each of the projects is at a different stage of planning, consultation or reality but what’s clear is that carbon capture, usage and storage, or CCUS, projects are coming fast. That equates to the construction of vast developments with complex heavy-lift and project cargo transport requirements.

Leading the way is the Heidelberg Materials’ facility for capture, storage and offloading of CO2. It is part of the Norwegian government’s Longship project, along with Northern Lights – the storage part, in which partners are building an open access CO2 transport and storage infrastructure network for the transport of CO2 by tanker to a purpose-built receiving terminal.

The Brevik facility, the first industrial-scale CCS project at a cement production plant in the world, has a target to capture 400,000 tonnes of CO2 a year. After three years of intensive construction work, the facility is due to be mechanically complete this year and go into operation in 2025.

As about 80 percent of the funding has come from the Norwegian state, there is not only intense scrutiny plus additional reporting requirements, but also an obligation to share lessons learned, said Anders Skaerlund Petersen, project manager for decarbonization and process innovation at Heidelberg Materials. “We are open to giving advice – we are required to do so by the Norwegian state,” he said. “A lot of the focus is learning and acting on the lessons learned.”


Overcoming Space Constraints

Construction of the carbon capture plant has been particularly challenging due to space constraints and the fact that it is going ahead alongside a huge cement plant which has continued in operation throughout. “Often there will not be enough space onsite for such installations because they will be built next to an existing plant, not on a greenfield site,” Petersen said. “Perhaps in future, there will be the construction of a cement plant and carbon capture all at once – but that’s something for the future.”

There have been a lot of challenges – “absolutely no question about it,” he said. “We are doing things that have never been done before. In one way, the construction has been pretty traditional for us but what differentiates this from a normal cement plant construction is the huge amount of piping and moving from ordinary steel to all sorts of stainless steel materials, which is new for us.”

Petersen is working with three subproject managers – one focused on civil works, one on the CO2 plant and one on the electrical areas and plant integration (with the cement plant). Aker Carbon Capture is the main contractor for engineering, procurement and construction, and Heidelberg is also supported by other expert consultants. Aker Solutions is providing engineering, procurement and management assistance.

Components to be shipped in and installed have included the 50-meterhigh, 7 meters diameter absorber, which weighs in at 200 tonnes, and a 50-meter-high stack which sits on top of the absorber, six storage tanks weighing 250 tonnes each and measuring 24 meters high, the 200-tonne liquefaction module, and two giant bridges complete with pipework – to name but a few.

The Brevik site is in a narrow bay with little room for maneuver. “We knew from the start that space was going to be the big issue. Laydown areas have definitely been a huge challenge, perhaps one that was underestimated at the beginning of the project,” Petersen said.


Thinking Outside the Box

There have been some notably creative solutions. The cement plant’s underground mine has been used for back-up laydown space; a barge was rented to provide about 1,900 square meters of additional laydown area; a jetty was purpose-built; and the nearby Trosvik shipyard has played a key role, as has the port next door.

The Port of Grenland has facilities for lift-on, lift-off and roll-on, roll-off, and has been vital in providing port facilities, cranes and loading services. Heidelberg also constructed a 60x10 meters jetty on its own site, purely to serve the project. “Without this jetty, I don’t know how we would have moved in the equipment,” Petersen said. The jetty has been used for landing heavy equipment on self-propelled modular transporters.

The barge was leased from Brevik Shipping – originally it was intended as portable storage for small pieces, but it ended up being pressed into service for much more. “We had to temporarily store equipment on the barge but there were no facilities to load from ship to barge at our site,” Petersen said. “This was done in the public harbor, which has space for two ships to be docked at the same time.”

The absorber, stack and desorber all arrived for unloading at the port, where they were rolled across a loading platform from ship to barge; the barge was then moved to sit alongside the jetty at the CCS site, with the components offloaded as required.

More recently, the barge has been at the shipyard 1 kilometer away, to support the fitting out of two bridge sections with a combined length of around 100 meters, including installation of pipework, in advance of installation onsite. In March 2024, the liquefaction module, the desorber (a single piece of process machinery), the reboiler and condensate modules were due to be lifted into place.

Six 1,000 cubic meter liquefied CO2 storage tanks, weighing 250 tonnes each and measuring 24 meters high, are already installed. When they arrived by ship from Aviles, Spain, space had to be found for them until the foundations were complete. Part of the cement plant’s coal storage area was taken over.


Supporting Infrastructure Challenges

K2 Project Forwarding delivered the six CO2 storage tanks from Aviles to Brevik, working with Finnish shipping company Meriaura. Quickport Logistics handled shipments of the absorber, desorber and cooling unit; all of these were loaded at Paldiski North Port in Estonia, and shipped via Port of Antwerp.

“The largest unit was 43.7 x 4.6 x 6.65 meters, weighing 70 tonnes,” said Mihhail Aprelski, head of logistics at Quickport. “The cargo was produced in Estonia by Estanc. We tried to minimize the footprint as much as possible during transport and made the decision to use the ferry connection between Paldiski and Antwerp. It was a big challenge to make this work, with a height limitation of 7.2 meters on the ferry.”

Piling has added to the challenges. “The cement plant is basically built on sediment, so the site is not very strong. Every time we build something, we first have to do piling into the bedrock.”

Communication has been another focus area. “I speak a lot with my subproject managers. From the communication perspective, with so many stakeholders, this has been a very challenging project,” Petersen said. “It is not as if the organization has done this ten times before. A lot of the people involved had never met each other before and have been working together for the first time.”


Lessons Learned

“We had the desorber taking up space on the jetty for quite some time and it would have been a benefit if we had this space available for other things than a big chunk of equipment.

"Quite often, suppliers constructing this equipment would likely have big yards or industrial facilities and probably have space for this equipment – it would have been helpful to leave the equipment with the supplier for a longer time instead of transporting it as early as possible. That’s something to be taken into consideration. Big equipment should be installed just-in-time, if possible, when you have a very congested site. However, that is not easy because specialist ships are booked many months in advance.”

Additionally, the low loading bearing capacity of the soil around the plant has meant that every time a heavy-lift or SPMT move has taken place, the working areas have had to be strengthened with wooden beams or even concrete foundations, which are expensive to rent/construct and take up space themselves. “We have had to do foundation strengthening using concrete. Perhaps it would have been a cheaper long-term solution to strengthen parts of the area with concrete from the start.”

The barge was “a very good idea, not cheap” and the jetty was vital in providing flexibility to dock barges and ships and handle all kinds of equipment.

A 650-tonne crawler crane was hired in to lift the absorber – as pointed out by Petersen, this involved crane parts arriving in multi-truck loads for assembly onsite. “If it is possible to use a mobile crane instead of mobilizing a crawler crane, a lot of time and cost could be saved.”

Other projects to secure some of the EU’s €594m total Connecting Europe Facility for Energy (CEF-E) funding include the Dartagnan CO2 export hub at the Port of Dunkirk, France; two carbon capture projects in the Port of Rotterdam, Netherlands – the CO2NEXT import terminal and the ARAMIS undersea trunkline connection; the EU Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) Interconnector at Gdansk, Poland; and the Northern Lights project, to support expansion of the CO2 import terminal at Øygarden, Norway, and the construction of a 100-kilometer offshore pipeline to the storage site.


The Port of Rotterdam is host port for Breakbulk Europe 2024 on 21-23 May.

TOP PHOTO: Barging two CO2 tanks from Spain. CREDIT: Heidelberg Materials
SECOND PHOTO: CO2 tanks in storage at the cement plant’s coal storage area. Foundations for the tanks are in the foreground. CREDIT: Heidelberg Materials