WORLD NEWS | Denmark wants to pump some climate gases under the ocean floor

COPENHAGEN, March 8 (AP) — Denmark pressed the button Wednesday on an ambitious project to bury vast quantities of the planet-heating carbon dioxide gas under the North Sea, hoping it will help the Nordic countries and beyond address climate change goals.

A green sands project in Denmark’s North Sea will be the world’s first cross-border carbon storage project, an international consortium including chemicals giant INEOS and gas and oil producer Wintershall Dea said.

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Denmark’s Crown Prince Frederik ordered the start of injecting carbon dioxide into the depleted reservoirs of the Nini West oil field, a symbolic order after his father, Prince Henrik, celebrated 50 years since oil and gas exploration began off the Danish coast.

“Today I am very happy to be able to reverse the traffic in the pipeline and send CO2 back into the Danish underground, thus benefiting the climate in Denmark, Europe and the planet,” says Frederik.

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Initially, the gas will be shipped in liquid form from the INEOS plant in Belgium, but plans are later on to import CO2 from Denmark and other European countries.

After the pilot phase, 1.5 million tons of greenhouse gases per year will be buried in the sandstone reservoir 1.8 kilometers (1.1 miles) below the seabed, increasing to 8 million tons per year by 2030.

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

“To keep global temperatures below 1.5 degrees, we need to remove carbon while working to reduce emissions,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a video address at the Greensand launch.

She points out that the EU-27 needs to capture and store around 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year by 2050 if it is to become climate neutral, meaning all greenhouse gas emissions still being produced by then must be eliminated again in some way.

“It’s a staggering number,” von der Leyen said.

Carbon capture and storage remains an unproven technology and reliance on it could undermine efforts to decarbonise the energy sector, experts have warned.

The technology to store carbon was first developed in the 1970s to help boost oil production, said Bruce Robertson, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

By pumping natural gas into the ground, fossil fuel companies can pump more oil and gas from existing wells.

While several recent projects have focused on the climate benefits of storing carbon underground, they have largely been unsuccessful, he said.

Robertson cites Australia’s Gorgon project, driven by industry giants such as Chevron, Shell and ExxonMobil, as attracting the best petroleum engineers in the world. “And they couldn’t get the program to work,” he said. “It performed terribly.”

Energy company Equinor has successfully stored carbon in two reservoirs off the coast of Norway, but had to stop a project in Algeria because the carbon dioxide “started spreading all over the plant,” Robertson said.

Each project will require costly custom solutions, because subsurface conditions can be vastly different, and there’s no way to know if the carbon dioxide will be released again, such as in the event of an earthquake, he said.

“You’re putting a series of carbon bombs in the ground that could go off at some indeterminate point in the future,” he told The Associated Press in a video interview in Australia.

Capturing and burying carbon dioxide also requires a lot of energy, much of it from industrial processes or fossil fuel extraction, Robertson noted.

And it can’t remove the carbon dioxide released by burning fuel, such as in cars or home heaters, which accounts for the majority of emissions.

“Carbon capture and storage in the oil and gas industry can only solve very small problems, not the elephant in the room,” he said.

Importantly, the emissions captured by the project would not be used to justify increased production, but would actually lead to a net reduction in emissions, said Maeve O’Connor, an analyst with the nonprofit energy research group Carbon Tracker.

“We often see high-profile breakthrough projects from oil and gas companies, but the reality is that if companies do not cut production in parallel, their greenhouse gas emissions will continue to grow, and the global 1.5 degrees Celsius target will become increasingly difficult to reach,” she said. explain.

Still, the IEA predicts that the most ambitious transition to net-zero emissions will require storing or otherwise using 1.5 gigatons of carbon dioxide globally by 2030, rising to 6.2 gigatons by 2050. Governments, including the US and Europe, have earmarked substantial subsidies for carbon capture and storage (CCS).

Denmark’s climate and energy minister, Lars Agard, has made it clear his country wants a piece of the action.

“Excuse my French, we simply cannot achieve global climate goals without carbon dioxide storage,” he said. “This is the tool we need.” (AP)

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