Last week, Denmark has stored the first volumes of carbon dioxide in an old oil and gas field in the Danish North Sea. The carbon dioxide sequestered comes from a chemical production plant (Ineos Oxide) in the Port of Antwerp, Belgium.
Since 2010, Ineos Oxide has captured CO2 as a by-product from its ethylene oxide (plastics) production, cooled it down to a liquid, and resold the product to the food (fizzy drinks, beer) and agricultural (greenhouse cultivation) industry. Now, instead, part of this production was transported to Nini, a previously abandoned oil platform about 200 km in front of the Danish coast, and injected 1,800 meters deep.
The test project, named Greensand, needs to prove that the process is possible, and safe. The modified transport vessel used, Aurora Storm, can only take 800 ton CO2 per traject; it will have to shuttle back and forth between Antwerp and Denmark about 20 times, enough for 15,000 ton, this year alone. The project will be upscaled to 1.5 million ton a year by 2025.
By 2030, 8 million ton a year is planned, or about half the carbon dioxide emitted by Antwerp's chemical cluster, the largest in Europe. This, however, requires investments in new offshore infrastructure, and larger transport ships known as CO2 carriers.
The Greensand project is racing behind another project though. That project is called Northern Lights, and aims to be able to store 1.5 million ton a year, by next year, 2024. Northern Lights is a partnership between Shell, Equinor and Total, and supported by Norway's government Langskip (Longship) CCS project.
The EU has set a target of capturing and storing a minimum 300 million ton CO2 a year by 2050.
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"The green transition is not easy, but it is possible."
Ultimately, to manage this climate change thingy, we need to put back all the carbon dioxide emitted since about the 1960s somewhere in a deep hole.
Now Norway has taken the first serious step towards that goal.
We've mentioned their industrial scale carbon-capture-and-storage [CCS] project -- dubbed NorthernLights -- earlier before, when it was still in the proof-of-concept phase. Now NorthernLights has turned fully operational.
The first shipment of carbon dioxide left Heidelberg Materials' plant in Brevik in southern Norway this month by ship, and will be injected in reservoirs under the North Sea in August. It is set to store 5mn tonnes of carbon dioxide under the sea, at a cost of $3.4bn, spread out of 10 years. The Norvegian government subsidizes 64% of the costs, while the rest is covered by a consortium of 3 oil companies (Shell, Equinor, and TotalEnergies).
Proponents of CCS argue that it is the most promising solution for so-called hard-to-abate sectors — such as cement, steel and coal-fired power — to eliminate their emissions. But critics contend that it is a costly process, difficult to scale and dependent on massive subsidies. These are often difficult for most cash-strapped governments to provide, except for the likes of Norway, western Europe's largest petroleum producer and home to the world's largest sovereign wealth fund.
To put this in context, the European Union has set a target of capturing and storing 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, by 2050.
The driver to do so is the increasing cost of carbon permits. These are publicly traded in the EUs Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) under a cap-and-trade system. The cap means that the amount of carbon permits given to a company each year are decreasing in time, ending up at 0 in 2050. The scheme currently covers only the largest emitters, i.e. approximately 10,000 companies in the power sector and manufacturing industry as well as airlines operating between airports located in the European Economic Area, covering roughly 40 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions of the EU. There are talks going on to extend the system to other companies as well.
The EU ETS market didn't come out of the blue: it was inspired by the USA's Clean Air Act of 1977, which laid down a trading scheme to curb acid rain by capping-and-trading sulphur dioxide emissions. Other countries, as well as separate US states, are now copying this approach for their own carbon dioxide emissions, e.g. China and California. The global value of carbon markets is expected to reach 2.68 trillion dollars by 2028 and 22 trillion by 2050.
Albert Rösti, Switzerland's energy minister, said on Tuesday that CCS was "too expensive" for his landlocked country and that it would be the "last step" to meeting climate targets after easier measures such as cutting transport emissions. Nonetheless, he added: "It is not only theory, but Norway has gone to action."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 13 2023, @01:30PM (3 children)
What are the chances that "Nini, a previously abandoned oil platform" is sitting on top of a lot of oil, that wasn't available by the old, normal methods? As seen in a number of places, fracking makes available significant amounts of oil from previously abandoned fields...
The CO2 won't stay down there for long if those old wells are fracked--which could easily happen during an oil price shock.
(Score: 4, Touché) by janrinok on Monday March 13 2023, @03:29PM
It's possible - but Denmark is well advanced in switching to renewable energy.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 13 2023, @03:31PM
Fracking won't take more than a few years, right? They can resume CO2 storage afterward, should this actually need to be a thing.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by GloomMower on Monday March 13 2023, @03:37PM
Maybe, they've already done fracking on those wells areas? I don't know that it matters to much. The US alone releases 5 billion tons a year.
Maybe consider this a learning experiment.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 13 2023, @03:31PM (11 children)
It's hard to get very motivated about expending energy to do something so futile. If they could convert CO2 into some kind of polymer, or plant trees, that would seem to be a more positive step. Burying shit underground - particularly gas - seems so depressing.
(Score: 2) by GloomMower on Monday March 13 2023, @03:44PM (10 children)
Where would you keep planting all these trees or keep them from decomposing? Do you just keep cutting down tree making it into charcoal, storing it and plant some more?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 13 2023, @03:52PM (6 children)
There's a spot outside my apartment where you could plant a tree. Should be good for 100 years, then replace with another tree. Bury the old one under the ocean in abandoned north sea oil fields.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 13 2023, @04:31PM (5 children)
If you do this, your one tree will sequester something on the order of 1 tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere in total over the course of its 100 year lifetime. So if every single man, woman and child alive today on the planet were to do this, we could sequester about 10 billion tonnes over this 100 year period. Or on average, about 100 million tonnes per year.
That might sound like a lot, until you realize that global CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels is on the order of 40 billion tonnes per year, so 100 million tonnes per year is not even half of one percent of an impact on the problem. Planting trees and thinking this is going to do anything about climate change is just a greenwashed delusion.
And that's completely ignoring the logistical nightmare that would be involved with storing billions and billions of dead trees so they don't decompose and release most of that CO2 right back into the atmosphere where it came from.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 13 2023, @05:01PM (1 child)
I know it's along the lines of more greenwashing, but,
> storing billions and billions of dead trees
is easy to do--just use them to build buildings and replace as much concrete as possible...since concrete/cement production is responsible for a big chunk of CO2 emissions (I saw 8% somewhere, don't have a reference).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 13 2023, @11:49PM
Not to mention, "storing billions and billions of dead trees" is what we refer to as "soil".
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 13 2023, @10:23PM
Bullshit. Wood is about 90% carbon and each tonne of carbon is a two and a half tonnes of CO2. A 100 year old tree masses considerably more than 400kg unless you've been playing Bonsai with it.
An Australian Sugar Gum will average about a tonne of mass per decade over its life, converting two and a half tonnes of CO2 into rot-resistant eucalypt timber that if you just stacked it in a desert and covered it with sand would still be there in 1000 years.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 13 2023, @10:45PM (1 child)
If they were to do it with 200 trees each though? That would check the box. The real problem is lack of space, not the labor impracticality of planting lots of trees. I'll note that the lumber industry sequesters quite a bit of carbon in buildings and landfills. So it's just a matter of quantity not strategy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 13 2023, @11:15PM
We have space but presently it's in desert form. Therefore the question is how do we reclaim the desert? I'm glad you asked! Re-greening the desert is practical and underway in many places [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PinkyGigglebrain on Monday March 13 2023, @11:06PM (2 children)
bingo.
Unlike gaseous CO2 charcoal is almost pure Carbon and a solid. No pressure or cryo storage needed to store it. convert it into a slurry and you could pump it into old mines or wells and fill every nook and cranny possible.
With CO2 if there is a leak anywhere in the system, a fault line in the bedrock, a burst bore hole liner, etc. and all that CO2 would eventually vent back into the atmosphere at a later date.
Personally I advocate using something like Bamboo, Hemp, or other fast growing high cellulose yield plants with an annual harvest over trees which take decades to mature. Use part of the charcoal to fuel the charcoal kilns (did you know that large sugarcane plantations burn the de-jucied cane to power the refining process?)
Pick a plant that thrives in the local climate and run with it. May not be as flashy or PR talking points as what Denmark is planing but it would work long term. Putting CO2 in an old well just pushes the issue into the future when the well starts leaking.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 13 2023, @11:19PM
Converting topsoil to charcoal is a bad plan, so why not take a longer view and ask how we can spend some of that precious CO2 sequestration budget on turning shitty, rain-scarred scrub back into forest. It may take a few decades or more - but there's no harm in making the place a bit nicer.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 14 2023, @12:03AM
Which is not that big a deal, if the later date is a much later date. Earth already sinks a massive amount of CO2. Stretch CO2 release over a greater length of time and it'll do a much better job of absorbing it (say with all these plants we're talking about).
My bet is if we globally stabilize climate at a particular level in the long term, it'll have CO2 levels at or above present levels. Warm Earth is vastly better than cold Earth.