TotalEnergies exploring CO2 storage in North Sea

TotalEnergies has been awarded two licenses to explore CO2 storage potential in the Danish North Sea.

The licenses are located 250 km off the west coast of Denmark and cover an area of 2118 km2.

The acreage includes the Harald gas fields, currently operated by TotalEnergies, for which the Company is already assessing CO2 storage opportunities within the framework of the Bifrost project, as well as a saline aquifer that could increase CO2 storage volumes and bring a competitive solution to the market.

The Bifrost project’s goal is to help Denmark meet its carbon neutrality goals and to provide employment alternatives to the workforce currently related to oil and gas production.

The Bifrost project builds on the learnings from the ongoing two-year studies, carried out with the support of the Danish Energy Technology Development and Demonstration Programme. The project is headed by TotalEnergies and performed together with the DUC partners (Noreco and Nordsøfonden), Ørsted and the Technical University of Denmark.

Alongside state-owned Nordsøfonden (20%), TotalEnergies (80%) will be the future operator of the offshore CO2 storage licenses. The company said it will carry out evaluation and appraisal work to develop a project that could ultimately transport and permanently store more than 5 Mt CO2/year, by repurposing existing infrastructure in the Danish North Sea and building new facilities.

“With its large geological storage potential and its proximity to major industrial emitters in Central Europe, Denmark can play a leading role in carbon capture and storage on the continent,” said Arnaud Le Foll, Senior Vice President New Business - Carbon Neutrality at TotalEnergies. “With the Northern Lights project under construction in Norway and projects under development in the Netherlands and the UK, the North Sea area will be the main contributor to our objective of 10 Mt/y of CO2 storage by 2030 and to the decarbonization of the European economy.”

TotalEnergies said its focus is first to avoid and then to reduce its emissions by developing and deploying a systematic approach, asset-by-asset, to implement the best available technologies. In particular, the company is developing industrial projects for carbon capture, transport, and storage (CCS). Backed by core competencies in large-scale project management, gas processing and geosciences, TotalEnergies is on track to achieve its goal of developing storage capacity of 10 million metric tons of CO2 per year by 2030 through significant industrial projects such as Northern Lights in Norway and Aramis in the Netherlands. .