Danish CCS project moves into pilot phase
The consortium planning Denmark's first carbon capture and storage (CCS) project, Greensand CCS, is moving on to the pilot phase having had technical approval, said partner Wintershall August 17. The aim will be to prove that CO2 can be injected into the offshore Nini West reservoir which is operated by Wintershall Dea. The ultimate aim is to inject up to 8mn metric tons (mt)/yr. That would be a quarter of Denmark's emissions.
CCS has had political support in Denmark, with parliament seeing it as part of the plan to meet emissions targets. Project Greensand alone could potentially deliver all the CO2 storage envisaged in the Danish Climate Programme.
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It will not be until late next year that injections will start, with the emissions to come from Danish cement producer Aalborg Portland and transported to the Nini West reservoir by ship. If successful, the pilot would lead to full-scale CO2 storage in the Nini West field by 2025, subject to the right funding and regulatory conditions.
The Nini West reservoir is in the Siri Area in the Danish North Sea. It could hold storage potential of 0.5-1mn mt/yr by 2025, rising to 4-8mn mt/yr by 2030.
Wintershall said the pilot would be "a leap forward for our practical understanding of safe and environmentally-secure CCS implementation.”
Wintershall is also exploring CCS possibilities in Norway, the Netherlands and Germany and it has a methane pyrolysis research partnership with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, among its other low-carbon plans.
Wintershall Dea is partnered with Ineos and 30 other companies and organisations. In the successful first phase of the project, it was demonstrated that there were no barriers to the development of a CO2 storage site, resulting in an independent certification from Norway's DNV.