Denmark begins to bury carbon dioxide

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Denmark on Wednesday launched an ambitious project to bury large amounts of carbon dioxide — a planet-warming gas — beneath the floor of the North Sea, in hopes it can help the Nordic nation and other countries achieve their climate goals.

An international consortium including chemical giant INEOS and oil and gas producer Wintershall Dea has said the Greensand project in the Danish North Sea will be the world’s first cross-border coal storage project.

Denmark’s Prince Frederick has given the symbolic order to start pumping CO2 into an empty reservoir at the Nini West oilfield, 50 years after his father Prince Harry celebrated the start of oil and gas exploration offshore from Denmark.

“It is a great pleasure for me today to be able to reverse the traffic in the pipes and return the CO2 to the Danish subsoil for the benefit of the climate of Denmark and Europe, but also of the planet”, assured Federico.

Initially, the gas will be transported in liquid form from an INEOS plant in Belgium, but there are plans to import the CO2 from Denmark and other European countries later. After a pilot phase, the project predicts that 1.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases will be buried each year in a sandstone reservoir 1.8 kilometers (1.1 miles) below the seabed, rising to 8 million tonnes per year by 2030.

In a recent report, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said carbon capture and storage technology must be part of the package of solutions to reduce emissions and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.

“To keep global temperatures below 1.5 degrees, we need to decarbonise as part of our grassroots efforts to reduce emissions,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a video address during of the inauguration of the Greensand project.

Von der Leyen pointed out that the 27-nation European Union must capture and store some 300 million tonnes of CO2 per year by 2050 if it is to achieve climate neutrality, which means that all greenhouse gas emissions from Greenhouses that continue to spawn will need to be removed one way or another. .