An international consortium including chemicals giant INEOS and gas and oil producer Wintershall Dea said Project Greensand in Denmark’s North Sea will be the world’s first cross-border carbon storage project.
The project goal is to bury vast amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) gas beneath the North Sea floor, in the hope that it can help Denmark and others meet climate targets.
The gas will be shipped in liquid form from an INEOS plant in Belgium. The plan also includes bringing in CO2 from Denmark and other European countries later on. After a pilot stage, it will see 1.5-million metric tons of the greenhouse gas buried in a sandstone reservoir 1.8 kilometers (1.1 miles) below the seabed each year, rising 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 technology has to be part of the range of solutions to reduce emissions and cap global warming at 1.5°C (2.7°F) compared with pre-industrial times.
“To keep global temperatures below 1.5 degrees we need to remove carbon on top of our efforts to reduce emissions,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a video address at the Greensand launch event.
She noted that the 27-nation European Union needs to capture and store about 300 million tons of CO2 annually by 2050 if it wants to be climate neutral, meaning all the greenhouse gas emissions still produced then will have to be removed again somehow.
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