Esbjerg, Denmark –
In the North Sea where Denmark once drilled for oil, imported European carbon dioxide will soon be buried under the seabed in a carbon capture and storage (CCS) project nearing completion.
CCS technology is one of the tools approved by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) to curb global warming, especially for reducing the carbon dioxide footprint of industries like cement and steel that are difficult to decarbonize. But the technology is complex and costly.
Led by British chemicals giant Ineos, the Greensand project 170 kilometers off the Danish coast consists of a deep, empty reservoir beneath a small, wind-swept oil platform in the North Sea.
In its first phase, due to begin in the next few months, Greensand is slated to store 400,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.
It’s “a very good opportunity to reverse the process: instead of extracting oil, we can now inject CO2 into the ground,” said Mads Gade, Ineos’s head of European operations.
Liquefied carbon dioxide sourced mainly from biomass power plants will be shipped from Europe via the Esbjerg terminal in southwestern Denmark to the Nini platform above an empty oil reservoir, into which it will be injected.
“The reason why the North Sea is seen as a vault for CO2 storage is because of the enormous amounts of data that we have collected through over 50 years of petroleum production,” said CCS coordinator Ann Helen Hansen at the Norwegian Offshore Directorate (Sodir).
This area of the North Sea is teeming with depleted oil and gas fields like Nini, as well as deep rock basins.
According to Sodir, the Norwegian part of the North Sea alone theoretically has a geological storage capacity of around 70 gigatons of carbon dioxide. On the British side, the figure is 78 Gt, according to the British government.
In Denmark, the geological institute has no overall data, but the Bifrost project, led by TotalEnergies, estimates it could store 335 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.
By comparison, the European Union’s greenhouse gas emissions amounted to about 3.2 Gt last year.
Containers where liquified carbon dioxide will be stored in the future at the construction site for the Greensand carbon dioxide terminal in the Port of Esbjerg, Denmark, expected to be completed in spring 2026. In its first phase, the facility is slated to store 400,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.
| AFP-JIJI
Under the Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA), the EU has set a legally binding target to have a storage capacity of at least 50 million metric ton per year by 2030.
Installations are gradually being put in place. Greensand plans to increase its carbon dioxide injection capacity to up to 8 million metric tons per year by 2030.
In neighboring Norway, the world’s first commercial carbon dioxide transport and storage service, dubbed Northern Lights, carried out its first carbon dioxide injection in August into an aquifer 110 kilometers off Bergen on the western coast.
Its owners — energy giants Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies — have agreed to increase annual capacity from 1.5 to 5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide by the end of the decade.
And in the U.K., authorities have just launched a second tender, after already awarding 21 storage permits in 2023. A first injection of carbon dioxide is expected in the coming years.
But customers are still nowhere to be found.
For industrial actors, the cost of capturing, transporting and storing their emissions remains far higher than the price of purchasing carbon allowances on the market, and even more so when it involves burying them at sea.
“Offshore is probably more expensive than onshore but with offshore there’s often more public acceptance,” said Ann Helen Hansen.
To date, the Northern Lights consortium has signed only three commercial contracts with European companies to store their carbon dioxide.
The consortium would probably never have seen the light of day without generous financial support from the Norwegian state.
While it supports the use of CCS for sectors that are hard to decarbonize, the Norwegian branch of Friends of the Earth says CCS has been used as an excuse to avoid having to exit the oil era.
“The idea that the region responsible for the problem could now become part of the solution is a very seductive narrative,” said the head of this environmental NGO, Truls Gulowsen. “But that’s not really what we’re seeing. Fossil fuels and climate emissions from the North Sea are far larger than anything we could ever put back there with CCS.”
