Greensand project: Denmark first nation to import and bury CO2

Denmark yesterday inaugurated a project to store carbon dioxide 1 800 metres beneath the North Sea, the first country in the world to bury CO2 imported from abroad.

The CO2 graveyard, where the carbon is injected to prevent further warming of the atmosphere, is on the site of an old oil field.

Eight million tons

Led by British chemical giant Ineos and German oil company Wintershall Dea, the Greensand project is expected to store up to eight million tons of CO2 a year by 2030. In December, it received an operating permit to start its pilot phase.

Still in their infancy and costly, carbon capture and storage projects aim to capture and then trap CO2 in order to mitigate global warming.

Europe

About 30 projects are currently operational or under development in Europe. Unlike other projects which store CO2 emissions from nearby industrial sites, Greensand distinguishes itself by bringing in the carbon from far away.

Captured at the source, the CO2 is liquefied – in Belgium in Greensand’s case – then transported, currently by ship but potentially by pipelines, and stored in reservoirs such as geological cavities or depleted oil and gas fields.

The carbon is transported in special containers to the Nini West platform, where it is inject[1]ed into an existing reservoir 1.8 kilometres under the seabed. Once the pilot phase is completed, the plan is to use the neighboring Siri field as well.

2045

Danish authorities, who have set a target of reaching carbon neutrality as early as 2045, say this is “a much needed tool in our climate toolkit”.

The North Sea is particularly suitable for this type of project as the region already has pipelines and potential storage sites after decades of oil and gas production.

“The depleted oil and gas fields have many advantages because they are well understood and there are already infrastructures which can most likely be reused,” said Morten Jeppesen, director of the Danish Offshore Technology Centre at the Technical University of Denmark.

TotalEnergies

France’s TotalEnergies is also exploring the possibility of burying CO2 with the aim of trapping five million tons per year by 2030.

In neighboring Norway, carbon capture and storage facilities are already in operation to offset domestic emissions but the country will also be receiving tons of liquefied CO2 in a few years’ time, transported from Europe by ship.

As Western Europe’s largest producer of oil, Norway also has the largest potential for CO2 stor[1]age on the continent, particularly in its depleted oil fields.

While measured in millions of tons, the quantities stored still remain a small fraction of overall emissions. According to the European Environment Agency, the member states of the European Union emitted 3.7 billion tons of greenhouse gases in 2020 alone, a year that also saw reduced economic activity owing to the Covid pandemic.

Long considered a complicated solution with marginal use, carbon capture has been embraced as necessary by the United Nation’s intergovernmental panel on climate change and the International Energy Agency.

But it remains far from a miracle cure for global warming. The energy-intensive process to capture and store the CO2 itself emits the equivalent of 21% of the gas captured, according to the Australian think-tank IEEFA. The technology also faces opposition from environmentalists.