Shipping Carbon Dioxide to Sea for Burial

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Building new pipelines to transport and ultimately bury greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, captured from industry and power plants, is rather expensive — a potential impediment to the spread of the technology known as carbon capture and sequestration, or C.C.S.

A.P. Moller-Maersk, a large Danish shipping and oil company, said it might have part of the solution.

On the sidelines of an international climate change conference in Copenhagen, Maersk announced this week that it was exploring ways of delivering the gases directly to burial sites using specially designed sea vessels, initially in the area of the North Sea.

That’s important because the success of C.C.S., which may take years to develop on a commercial scale, partly depends on moving gases efficiently to depleted oil and gas wells or aquifers — the chief proposed burial spots for captured CO2. Many of these potential CO2 tombs can be found below the seabed.

Maersk Tankers, a division of A.P. Moller-Maersk, already operates liquefied petroleum gas and liquefied natural gas carrier ships, while Maersk Oil operates wells in the North Sea. Executives said combining expertise in shipping and hydrocarbons could turn the transport and storage of greenhouse gases into a new business area.

A fleet of 15 so-called handy-size gas carriers, each with a capacity of 20,000 cubic meters, would be able to transport about half of annual CO2 emissions from industrial sites in Denmark to the North Sea for storage, said Martin Fruergaard, a senior vice president of Maersk Tankers and the head of the group’s gas carrier business.

Transporting CO2 by ship “is far more flexible and will not require the same large-scale investments as pipelines,” said Mr. Fruergaard, who added that the business case for these activities would be helped if Maersk could also pump the CO2 below the seabed to enhance oil recovery rates in maturing fields.

The company has drawn up blueprints for the new vessels, which could be ready within two years. Emissions of CO2 from vessels on short North Sea voyages were expected to be less than 1 percent of the total quantity of CO2 the ships had stowed on board. The business could eventually expand to the United States if it introduces offshore carbon burial on a significant scale.

Proponents of carbon capture-and-storage technology say it is an effective way of controlling the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. But skeptics argue that some applications of the technology — including using captured CO2 to push out the last remaining drops of oil from depleted wells — create additional planet-warming gases by enlarging the volume of fossil fuels available for use.