European Consortium Launches 3D Project

A consortium of 11 European stakeholders including ArcelorMittal, Axens, IFP Energies nouvelles (IFPEN) and Total, launched a project to demonstrate an innovative process for capturing CO2 from industrial activities named the DMX project.

It is part of a more comprehensive study dedicated to the development of the future European Dunkirk North Sea capture and storage cluster.

The “3D” project (for DMXTM Demonstration in Dunkirk) is part of Horizon 2020, the European Union’s research and innovation program.

The project has a 19.3 million euro budget over 4 years, including 14.8 million euros in European Union subsidies. Coordinated by IFPEN, the “3D” project brings together 10 other partners from research and industry from 6 European countries: ArcelorMittal, Axens, Total, ACP, Brevik Engineering, CMI, DTU, Gassco, RWTH and Uetikon.

The “3D” project’s ambition is to validate replicable technical solutions and to achieve industrial deployment of Capture & Storage technology around the world. It should play a major role in enabling industries with high energy consumption and CO2 emissions, such as the steel industry, to reduce their emissions. This project is an essential lever for meeting the targets of the Paris Agreement on global warming.

Capture consists in extracting the CO2 produced by large polluting industrial units, then putting it under pressure before injecting it into a geological storage area. In post-combustion capture, the CO2 is separated from other gases by absorption in a chemical solvent. Currently, the challenge facing research is to significantly increase the energy performances in this stage, the costliest part of the CSC process, to make this process more competitive.

Commercial-scale pilots, such as Dunkirk’s, are vital to make carbon capture, utilization and storage technologies more competitive, supporting the growth of low-carbon industry,” points out Marie-Noelle Semeria, Senior Vice President and Group Chief Technology Officer at Total. “Total aspires to become a major player in CCUS technologies, which are vital to achieving carbon neutrality in the second half of the century, and we are happy to be involved alongside our European partners.”