north sea

Carbon Capture In Denmark | Earth Wise

January 11, 2022 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Denmark has pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 70% by 2030 compared with 1990 levels. The country has also banned oil exploration in Danish waters and plans to phase out offshore drilling in the North Sea by 2050.

Instead of pumping oil from the North Sea, Denmark plans to capture CO2 and store it there. To meet its climate goals, Denmark is investing $2.4 billion in a plan to capture carbon dioxide from its energy and industrial sectors and inject it into the seabed in geological formations that previously held oil and gas deposits.

The first North Sea carbon capture and storage facilities will be put into service in 2025 and will remove nearly half a million tons of emissions from the atmosphere each year. The carbon dioxide will be captured from energy and industrial sectors such as waste incineration and cement production.

There are multiple carbon capture projects underway around the world. Many are directed at so-called direct air capture, which is taking carbon dioxide out of the air once it is already there. In Iceland, a project named “Orca” is extracting CO2 from the air and piping into a processing facility where it is mixed with water and diverted into a deep underground well. Other large direct air capture plants are being built in the U.S. Southwest and in Scotland.

Whether capturing carbon from industrial operations or directly from the air ultimately makes environmental and economic sense remains to be seen. What is driving the development of these technologies is the troubling math that reducing emissions is not happening fast enough to stave off the destructive effects of climate change that will result from global temperatures rising too much.

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Denmark bets on North Sea carbon capture to hit climate goals

Photo, posted July 2, 2018, courtesy of Ansgar Koreng via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Greenhouse Gas Removal And Net Zero | Earth Wise

November 18, 2021 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Reducing the amount of greenhouse gas emissions can slow the progress of global warming but only reaching and sustaining net zero global emissions can halt the progress of climate change.

The move to renewable power and the use of electric transport are substantial and essential ways to reduce emissions. But even if these transitions take place on a rapid timescale, they will not eliminate all emissions. Many industrial activities and, especially, agriculture will continue to contribute substantial greenhouse gas emissions. There are efforts to reduce the contributions of these things, but there are no zero-emission substitutes for most of them.

As a result, actually removing CO2 from the atmosphere once it is there is essential to achieve net zero emissions. If greenhouse gas removal can be scaled up sufficiently, it opens the option of going “net negative”, which would be the ideal way to mitigate and, better still, reverse the effects of climate change.

There are multiple approaches to carbon dioxide removal. Some are natural, involving ways of capturing and storing carbon in trees, biochar, and peatlands. Others are technological. An example is the system that has just gone into operation in Iceland that uses fans, chemicals, and heat to capture CO2 and then mineralize it in volcanic rock. Another is a system being tested in the UK that captures CO2 from growing biomass and pipes it to storage under the North Sea.

Much of the attention on carbon capture technology is aimed at trapping the emissions from fossil fuel power plants, but the need to remove carbon dioxide that has entered the atmosphere in other ways is ultimately far greater.

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CO2 removal is essential to achieving net zero

Photo, posted August 17, 2013, courtesy of Joshua Mayer via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Oil Platforms And Biodiversity | Earth Wise

April 8, 2021 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

We have previously reported on the important role that offshore oil platforms seem to play for fish. In short, the support structures of offshore oil platforms that often rise hundreds of feet through the water column create essentially a prefabricated reef for marine life.

According to a new study recently published in the British journal Ecological Solutions and Evidence, the large gatherings of fish around oil and gas platforms attract harbour porpoises searching for food – despite the fact that noise from industrial activities normally scares porpoises away.

Harbour porpoises are one of the smallest whale species and the only whale species that’s known to breed in Danish waters. The species has been protected in Danish waters since 1967. Previous studies have demonstrated that underwater noises from sources like shipping and industry typically scare porpoises away.

But according to new research from scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark, there are actually more porpoises around the largest Danish oil platform – Dan F – in the North Sea than there are within the three to ten kilometers surrounding the platform. The research team found that the platform acts as a natural reef where porpoises can find favorable habitat and food.

Currently, the international OSPAR convention requires that all decommissioned oil and gas platforms be removed from the ocean. But according to researchers, leaving the old platforms in the ocean to serve as artificial reefs is actually more beneficial to the marine environment.

In the Gulf of Mexico, the United States program Rigs to Reefs has converted 558 oil and gas platforms into artificial reefs.

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Harbor porpoises attracted to oil platforms when searching for food

Photo, posted March 26, 2008, courtesy of Dave Herholz via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Lots Of Wind Power In Denmark | Earth Wise

February 11, 2020 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Many states and countries have established goals to generate at least half of their electricity from renewable sources by some future date, typically 2030. A number of countries have already been able to achieve 50% or greater renewable generation for brief periods measured in days. Australia did it this past November. Germany has seen it on occasion as well.

Denmark has managed to complete an entire year with half of its energy coming from renewable generation. Almost all of it – 47% of the country’s power – came from wind turbines.

Denmark has been generating much of its energy from wind power for quite a while and actually produced about 46% of its electricity from renewable sources in 2017. Denmark was a pioneer in developing commercial wind power during the 1970s, is a major manufacturer of wind turbines, and the small country has installed over 6,000 of them. The gains this past year mostly came from the Horns Rev 3 offshore wind farm that went online in the fall. The 407 MW wind farm has the capacity to cover the annual electricity consumption of about 425,000 households, which is about 20% of the country.

The growth of wind power in Denmark is still ramping up. A 600 MW wind farm in the Baltic Sea will be connected to the Danish and German electricity grid by 2021, and a wind farm of at least 800 MW capacity in the North Sea is scheduled to come online in 2025.

The Danish Parliament has passed an ambitious climate law with the goal of reducing CO2 emissions by 70% in 2030 compared with 1990. The country’s overall goal of being carbon-neutral by 2050 does not seem like a pipe dream.

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Denmark Passes Magic 50% In Renewable Electricity Generation Milestone

Photo, posted July 12, 2009, courtesy of Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

The Largest Offshore Wind Farm

July 30, 2019 By EarthWise 1 Comment

The world’s largest offshore wind farm recently began operations in the North Sea, a notoriously gusty stretch of open water that has become home to multiple large wind farms. The new Hornsea One wind farm is located 75 miles off the east coast of Yorkshire in the United Kingdom.

The first 50 turbines are now in operation and are generating electricity for up to 287,000 homes. When the farm is completed sometime next year, it will have 174 turbines with a total capacity of 1.2 gigawatts, enough to power a million homes. The farm will send electricity to the UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Scandinavia. The Hornsea One farm will have more than twice the capacity of the current largest offshore operation, which is also in the UK.

Because the farm is so far from shore, teams of workers will live at sea for two to four weeks at a time maintaining it. Such operations are unprecedented and required new ways of operating to overcome the logistical and technical challenges of operating a massive power station far from land.

The UK has the largest offshore wind generating capacity in Europe, now more than 8.2 gigawatts and accounting for 44% of Europe’s offshore wind capacity. All that capacity is one of the big reasons that the UK has been successfully weaning itself off of coal for increasingly long periods of time.

Meanwhile, the US continues to lag far behind in offshore wind with a grand total of 0.03 gigawatts of installed capacity. That situation may be changing after the federal government auctioned off 3 major tracts of ocean late last year that potentially could generate over 4 gigawatts of power if fully developed.

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The World’s Largest Offshore Wind Farm Just Came Online

Photo credit: Hornsea Project One.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Testing The Ocean Cleanup Array

July 5, 2016 By WAMC WEB

It’s no secret that our oceans are full of plastic. Plastic trash can be found on up to 88% of the oceans’ surfaces, with most of the debris concentrated in the top two meters of water. The plastics gather in certain areas of the ocean due to the swirling nature of ocean currents, known as gyres. Some of these concentrations, such as the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch, are so large they can be seen from space.