CO2 Soon to Be Buried Under North Sea Oil Platform

AFP

ESBJERG, Denmark: In the North Sea, where Denmark once drilled for oil, imported European carbon dioxide will soon be buried beneath the seabed as part of a carbon capture and storage (CCS) project nearing completion.

CCS technology is among the tools endorsed by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) to curb global warming, particularly by reducing the carbon footprint of hard-to-decarbonise industries such as cement and steel. However, the technology remains complex and costly.

Led by British chemicals giant Ineos, the Greensand project, located 170 kilometres (105 miles) off the Danish coast, consists of a deep, depleted reservoir beneath a small, wind-swept oil platform in the North Sea.

In its first phase, expected to begin in the coming months, Greensand is slated to store 400,000 tonnes of CO2 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 CO2—sourced mainly from biomass power plants—will be shipped from across Europe via the Esbjerg terminal in southwestern Denmark to the Nini platform, above an empty oil reservoir, where it will be injected underground.

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“The reason why the North Sea is seen as a vault for CO2 storage is because of the enormous amounts of data collected through over 50 years of petroleum production,” said Ann Helen Hansen, CCS coordinator at the Norwegian Offshore Directorate (Sodir).

This area of the North Sea is dotted with depleted oil and gas fields like Nini, along with deep rock basins suitable for storage.

According to Sodir, the Norwegian sector of the North Sea alone theoretically has a geological storage capacity of around 70 billion tonnes (70 Gt) of CO2. On the British side, the figure is estimated at 78 Gt, according to the British government.

In Denmark, no comprehensive national data exists, but the Bifrost project, led by TotalEnergies, estimates a storage potential of 335 million tonnes of CO2.

By comparison, the European Union’s greenhouse gas emissions stood at about 3.2 Gt last year.

Costly Solution

Under the Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA), the European Union has set a legally binding target of achieving at least 50 million tonnes per year of CO2 storage capacity by 2030. Infrastructure is gradually being developed to meet this goal.

Greensand plans to ramp up its injection capacity to eight million tonnes per year by 2030.

In neighbouring Norway, the world’s first commercial CO2 transport and storage service—Northern Lights—carried out its first CO2 injection in August into an offshore aquifer located 110 kilometres off the western coast near Bergen.

Owned by Equinor, Shell, and TotalEnergies, Northern Lights plans to increase annual storage capacity from 1.5 million to five million tonnes by the end of the decade.

In Britain, authorities have launched a second tender after awarding 21 storage permits in 2023, with the first CO2 injections expected in the coming years.

However, customers remain scarce.

For industrial emitters, the cost of capturing, transporting, and storing CO2 is still far higher than purchasing carbon allowances on the emissions market—especially when offshore storage is involved.

“Offshore is probably more expensive than onshore, but with offshore there’s often more public acceptance,” said Hansen.

So far, the Northern Lights consortium has signed only three commercial contracts with European companies. The project would likely not have materialised without substantial financial backing from the Norwegian state.

While supporting CCS for sectors that are difficult to decarbonise, Norway’s branch of Friends of the Earth argues that the technology is being used to delay the transition away from fossil fuels.

“The idea that the region responsible for the problem could now become part of the solution is a very seductive narrative,” said Truls Gulowsen, head of the environmental NGO.

“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.”