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posted by janrinok on Monday May 13 2019, @01:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-a-gas! dept.

Three ports straddling the North Sea are going to work together to store carbon dioxide in disbandoned gas fields.

At a first stage, the ports of Rotterdam, Antwerp and Ghent-Terneuzen-Vlissingen aim at storing 10 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

The project, code-named CO2TransPorts, is an extension of an existing initiative started by the port of Rotterdam, Porthos.

It involves the building of a network of pipelines to catch the emissions of the neighboring refineries and chemical industry, transporting it to the harbour of Rotterdam, and from there through a 20 km underseas pipeline towards an abandoned gas field, 3 kilometers underneath the North Sea.

The ports involved already possess an extensive network of pipelines: Antwerp, for example, has 720 km of pipelines in the port alone, along with extensive connections to other pipelines criscrossing the Low Countries. The North Sea will see more than 300 gas/oil fields being decommissioned by 2025, according to industry figures.

The announcement comes closes on the heels of an investment of 2.7 billion euro in the Antwerp harbour by fast-growing British chemistry group Ineos. The investment is the biggest in the European chemical industry of the past 20 years and is controversial. Ineos CEO (and Brexiteer) Sir Jim Ratcliffe insists that the whole thing can only be profitable if it's fed by (US) shale gas. Ineos has big investments in the shale gas industry in the US.

Fracking, however, is considered environmentally damaging. Next to that, Antwerp is already the second largest petrochemical cluster in the world after Houston, Texas. The Ineos investment would increase further its carbon dioxide emissions to an unknown amount.

The three ports combined are currently responsible for 60 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year, or one third the total yearly emissions of the countries they're based in (the Netherlands and Belgium).


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @04:27AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @04:27AM (#842841)

    The beavers are just going to release this later.