Denmark inaugurates CO2 storage facility in North Sea

Energy group INEOS announced Friday that its Greensand carbon capture and storage (CCS) project had begun storing carbon dioxide under the seabed beneath an old oil-platform in the North Sea.

"Today, Greensand brings the EU's first full-scale CO2 storage site and value chain into operation. It provides a foundation on which future carbon capture projects across Europe can now build," INEOS chief executive David Bucknall said in a statement.

CCS technology is one of the tools approved by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) to curb global warming, especially for reducing the CO2 footprint of industries like cement and steel that are difficult to decarbonise.

But the technology is complex and costly.

The inauguration of the Greensand project proves "that carbon storage is a practical reality", European Commissioner for Energy Dan Jorgensen stressed.

"We set out a path for European industries: to continue their transition to a low-carbon future, while maintaining production, investments, and employment in our continent," he continued

Located some 200 kilometres (124 miles) off the Danish west coast, the Greensand reservoir lies beneath the old oil-platform Nini West.

In its first phase, the project is expected to store 400,000 tonnes of CO2 per year.

INEOS then intends to scale up the project and inject four to eight million tonnes annually by 2030.

The CO2 will be sourced mainly from Danish biomethane plants and be transported in liquefied form by ship from the mainland, departing from the port of Esbjerg in southwest Denmark.

Under the Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA), the EU has set a legally binding target to have a storage capacity of at least 50 million tonnes per year by 2030.

In neighbouring Norway, the world's first commercial CO2 transport and storage service, dubbed Northern Lights, carried out its first CO2 injection in August 2025 into an aquifer 110 kilometres off Bergen on the western coast.

Its owners -- energy giants Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies -- have agreed to increase annual capacity from 1.5 to five million tonnes of CO2 by the end of the decade.