ESBJERG: Within the North Sea the place Denmark as soon as drilled for oil, imported European carbon dioxide will quickly be buried beneath the seabed in a carbon seize and storage (CCS) mission nearing completion.
CCS expertise is among the instruments accredited by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Local weather Change (IPCC) and the Worldwide Power Company (IEA) to curb world warming, particularly for lowering the CO2 footprint of industries like cement and metal which might be troublesome to decarbonise.
However the expertise is complicated and dear.
Led by British chemical compounds large Ineos, the Greensand mission 170km off the Danish coast consists of a deep, empty reservoir beneath a small, wind-swept oil platform within the North Sea.
In its first part on account of start within the subsequent few months, Greensand is slated to retailer 400,000 tonnes of CO2 per yr.
It is “an excellent alternative to reverse the method: as a substitute of extracting oil, we are able to now inject CO2 into the bottom,” Mads Gade, Ineos’s head of European operations, informed AFP.
Liquefied CO2 sourced primarily from biomass energy vegetation shall be shipped from Europe through the Esbjerg terminal in southwestern Denmark to the Nini platform above an empty oil reservoir, into which it will likely be injected.
“The rationale why the North Sea is seen as a vault for CO2 storage is due to the large quantities of information that we now have collected by way of over 50 years of petroleum manufacturing,” mentioned CCS coordinator Ann Helen Hansen on the Norwegian Offshore Directorate (Sodir).
This space of the North Sea is teeming with depleted oil and gasoline fields like Nini, in addition to deep rock basins.
In accordance with Sodir, the Norwegian a part of the North Sea alone theoretically has a geological storage capability of round 70 billion tonnes (70 Gt) of CO2. On the British aspect, the determine is 78 Gt, in line with the British authorities.
In Denmark, the geological institute has no general knowledge, however the Bifrost mission, led by TotalEnergies, estimates it might retailer 335 million tonnes of CO2.
By comparability, the European Union’s greenhouse gasoline emissions amounted to about 3.2 Gt final yr.
