The Danish Underground Consortium (DUC), consisting of state-owned oil firm Nordsøfonden, French supermajor TotalEnergies and Norwegian outfit Noreco, have entered into a partnership with power company Ørsted on carbon capture and sequestration.

The project is titled Bifrost, and the parties have filed an application with Denmark's Energy Technology Development and Demonstration Program (EUDP), seeking aid out of the DKK 197m (EUR 26.5m) pool allocated by policy makers.

Carbon storage will take place beneath the Harald field, where TotalEnergies holds operator status. Last month, EnergyWatch reported first on the CCS plans. The operator declined at the time to inform of whether the companies planned to seek subsidies for their endeavor.

The parties will initially bank on being able to store 3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide under Harald per year, but their longer-term ambition is to store up to 16 million tonnes annually.

DUC thereby mimics competitor Ineos, which has long been maturing its CCS project, Greensand, also focusing on storing CO₂ beneath a depleted oil field – in this case, the Nini field.

The chemical group has already announced that it, alongside its 29-company consortium, has applied for all the funds in the pool. DUC doesn't mention whether the same is true of the Bifrost project.

Ørsted is part of the project as owner of the pipeline infrastructure connecting DUC's North Sea oil fields to shore. The utility is meant to carry out technical studies to examine whether and to what extent this infrastructure can be converted to transporting CO₂.

The Technical University of Denmark (DTU) is also part of the project as academic partner and provider of technical studies.

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