INEOS, with partners Harbour Energy and Nordsøfonden, has officially opened the Greensand CO2 storage site in the Danish North Sea. This is the first full-scale carbon storage facility in the European Union, marking a shift from pilot projects to commercial operation. The site will initially store up to 400,000 tonnes of CO2 per year, sourced mainly from Danish biomethane plants, with plans to expand to 4-8 million tonnes annually as industrial capture projects scale up. The process involves liquefying CO2 at source, trucking it to Port Esbjerg, shipping it on the Carbon Destroyer 1, the EU's first purpose-built CO2 carrier, and injecting it into the depleted Nini West oil field 1,800 meters below the seabed. This establishes a complete CCS value chain using available CO2 volumes, proving that storage is no longer a future concept but a working solution. For carbon market watchers, this is a significant step because it shows operational infrastructure for geological storage. The expansion potential, however, depends on continued investment and the pace of industrial capture projects. Monitoring and verification will be key to maintaining credibility as volumes grow.
