Denmark seeks to fill empty oil-gas reservoirs with CO2

A Danish project to store captured CO2 in North Sea reservoirs that were once filled with oil and gas moved a step closer to becoming operational, after winning approval from new stakeholders.

Twenty-nine companies, research institutes and universities agreed to support the next testing phase of the Greensand project, according to a statement on Tuesday. The backing came after initial work by the project's original four members, including Maersk Drilling A/S and INEOS Energy, showed the location is physically robust enough to store emissions safely, and injection into the sandstone is possible.

Denmark has some of Europe's toughest targets for cutting emissions, with a goal to reduce its carbon footprint by 70 per cent before 2030, compared with the level in 1990. The area encompassed by the Greensand project is large enough to hold all the CO2 that Denmark has proposed removing from the atmosphere in its climate programme, according to the coalition of stakeholders.

The government also wants the Nordic country, which fostered the global wind turbine industry through early subsidies, to become a linchpin in green technology. With carbon prices set to climb, the market for tools that capture and bury emissions could reach $2 trillion if used to cut pollution from heavy industry, according to Credit Suisse Group AG.

Greensand coalition members will now file a grant application with Denmark's energy demonstration programme to help fund the next stage, according to the statement. If that's approved, work could begin later this year on testing at the site, to see whether the idea works.