Author: Michael Barnard

ChatGPT generated panoramic image of dozens of trucks hauling CO₂ from Ørsted’s Avedøre plant to Asnæs, trailing euro signs like exhaust fumes

Yara, Ørsted, and the €200/ton Mirage: What Northern Lights Really Teaches Us About CCS

Northern Lights, Europe’s flagship cross-border carbon capture and storage project, is now ready to receive carbon dioxide for sequestration, with the first ships in the water and expected to start delivering waste gas from customers this year. It’s being celebrated as a triumph of climate leadership and engineering. But when … [continued]

ChatGPT generated panoramic image of a warehouse filled with labeled barrels of lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements, with shipping containers branded “LIT,” “REMX,” and “BATT” lined up for export

Grunge Meets Grid: How Pearl Jam’s Carbon Price Led Me to Battery ETFs

The world is electrifying at an accelerating pace, and while solar panels and wind turbines grab most of the headlines, the real power behind the transition lies buried in rocks and embedded in chemistry. Batteries and the critical minerals that go into them are the plumbing of the clean energy … [continued]

ChatGPT generated panoramic image of cross-section showing: LCO₂ ship → Øygarden tanks → high-pressure pumps → subsea pipeline → Johansen reservoir

Beneath the Fjord: Inside Northern Lights’ Carbon Storage Core

The Northern Lights carbon capture and storage project is often described as a logistics system, but at its core, it is a storage facility. The Øygarden terminal, its connecting offshore pipeline, and the Johansen Formation are the infrastructure that turns cross-border CO₂ shipments into permanent geological sequestration. Phase 1 is … [continued]

ChatGPT generated stylized aerial view of Øygarden Northern Lights terminal with multiple ships queuing and tanks labeled by volume

CO₂ By Sea: The Risky Bet Beneath Europe’s Biggest Carbon Storage Project

Northern Lights is Europe’s most ambitious carbon capture and storage project, and possibly the most operationally serious one in the world. It deserves credit for getting past the pilot stage, for designing an end-to-end storage system with real injection capacity, and for contracting with emitters in four different countries. But … [continued]

ChatGPT generated time-split panorama: sepia-tinted 1929 on the left (Ardnacrusha workers building the dam), glossy 2025 on the right (technicians installing grid-scale batteries and offshore cables)

Ireland’s Ardnacrusha Moment, Again: A Blueprint for Full Electrification

In recent months I’ve been assisting with strategy for a couple of emerging European NGOs on key decarbonization acceleration approaches, and one of the key participants asked me an interesting question this morning. This piece answers the question. The first NGO is Supergrid Europe, a Brussels-based organization which will be … [continued]

ChatGPT generated panoramic image of Airport Geothermal Use: A winter runway with inset showing heat storage aquifer beneath it and arrows showing seasonal heat injection and extraction.

Jane Austen, Directional Drilling & Dublin: Geothermal Lessons With Simon Todd

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Simon Todd, PhD, geologist, expert in geothermal, founder of Causeway Energies, and Irishman, not necessarily in that order, to talk all aspects of geothermal. Despite being often far underground, it’s having a moment in the sun right now, hence a recent … [continued]

ChatGPT generated create a panoramic Stylized infographic-style panorama showing the full CO₂ journey: capture, liquefaction, shipping, injection

Northern Lights CCS: Who Signed, Who Didn’t, & The Real Cost Of Industrial Carbon Capture

When BASF quietly backed away from signing a transport and storage agreement with Northern Lights for its Kairos@C project in Antwerp recently, it signaled more than just a missed customer for the high-profile Norwegian CCS initiative. It revealed the delicate balancing act at the heart of Europe’s carbon management ambitions: … [continued]

ChatGPT generated aerial panoramic view of flooded rice paddies under the sun, with a visual overlay showing slower nutrient diffusion from oxamide pellets

Green Oxamide vs Green Ammonia: The Chemistry Behind a Smarter Fertilizer

China’s latest move in green fertilizer chemistry hasn’t made headlines, but it represents a quietly significant development. A new facility in Xinjiang will soon be producing half a million tonnes of oxamide fertilizer per year—using captured CO₂, green hydrogen, and green ammonia. That sentence alone folds in three separate decarbonization … [continued]

ChatGPT generated panoramic image of a stage with actors walking off, hydrogen for energy props left behind — an allegory for the collapsing performance

Green Hydrogen For Energy Was A Story We Told Ourselves

Bruno Latour once said technology doesn’t succeed because it works. It succeeds because enough people act like it does. For nearly a decade, that’s exactly what happened with green hydrogen as an energy carrier. The story was so compelling, the coalition so wide, the urgency so real, that for a … [continued]

ChatGPT generated panoramic image of a flat-style infographic titled “Fueling the Future: Electric vs Hydrogen Trucks,” showing an electric truck with a green check mark and a hydrogen truck with a red prohibition symbol.

France & Germany’s Economic Councils Endorse Electric Trucks Over Hydrogen

The best news in freight decarbonization this year didn’t come from a truck manufacturer, a startup accelerator, or a press release festooned with EU flags. It came from a bunch of European economists. That’s right—after years of letting hydrogen hype men and fossil PR firms monopolize the freight emissions debate, … [continued]