Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.

Why can one European seabed take funded engineering money for CO₂ storage this year while another, with comparable storage rock beneath it, cannot legally accept a single tonne? That is the question the North Sea and the Baltic Sea now answer for anyone planning permanent carbon storage in Europe, and the answer has almost nothing to do with what is underground.

Start with the North Sea. The UK has greenlit development funding for the Viking CCS project, moving Harbour Energy’s Humber-to-North-Sea pipeline and storage plan from Track-2 promise to paid engineering work. The storage targets are depleted UK gas fields, and the permits sit inside a legal framework the UK controls on its own.

Now the Baltic. The Negative Emissions Platform and its partners are still at the petition stage, issuing a call to enable CO₂ storage in the Baltic Sea Region under the Helsinki Convention. That 1992 convention effectively bans sub-seabed CO₂ injection, treating it as pollution. Before any Baltic project can even apply for a permit, nine contracting states have to agree to amend the treaty. There is no timeline for that.

The comparison, dimension by dimension:

  • Legal status. North Sea: storage licensing is live and Viking holds funded permits. Baltic: injection is effectively prohibited until the convention itself changes.
  • Who decides. North Sea: the UK, unilaterally, on its own continental shelf. Baltic: nine states, by treaty amendment, with no single government able to move alone.
  • Regulatory ancestry. North Sea: a regime built for oil and gas exploitation, repurposed for injection. Baltic: an environmental protection convention with no exploitation legacy to piggyback on.
  • Demand connection. The EU’s long-awaited ETS reform pulls permanent removals into the compliance carbon market (the ETS is the EU’s Emissions Trading System, its cap-and-trade scheme). Viking can sell into that demand by decade’s end. A Baltic operator cannot sign anything because it cannot legally store anything.

Where the two seas converge is the surprising part: the geology is not the differentiator. Both basins hold usable storage formations, and both sit beside industrial capture demand. A recent CDRXIV preprint by Brown, Bartels, and Tutolo makes the general case empirically: permitting pathway, not geology or cost, is now the rate-limiting step for permanent storage projects. Viking versus the Baltic is that finding drawn on a map.

Where they diverge is inheritance. The UK’s storage advantage is a byproduct of its hydrocarbon legal regime. Fiona Harvey (@fionaharvey.bsky.social on Bluesky) noted the political heat around that regime: “As Andy Burnham contemplates ‘drill, baby, drill’ for the North Sea - a little reminder of why it would be electoral madness to desert net zero, whatever Tony Blair and the Treasury might think.” The uncomfortable truth for CDR is that the same legal machinery that licenses drilling is what licenses injection. Simon Evans (@drsimevans.carbonbrief.org on Bluesky) points at the flexibility built into it: “Labour could approve drilling at Rosebank, Jackdaw and a bunch of other sites without breaking 2024 manifesto pledge (They deliberately left this wiggle room; most people didn’t notice).” That wiggle room cuts both ways. It keeps hydrocarbon licences alive, and it makes storage permits routine. The Baltic states never built an equivalent framework, so there is nothing to repurpose.

So which matters more for CDR’s trajectory? The North Sea, clearly, in the near term. The EU’s 50 Mt per year 2030 storage target assumes injection capacity across multiple basins, and as IOGP’s Caterina De Matteis argues, targets without enabling measures do not create capacity. Right now one basin has legal clearance and pipelines under construction; the other has a petition. Buyers assembling durable-removal portfolios, like the 2030 offering from CUR8 and Isometric, will price that asymmetry into every offtake.

One caveat: Viking is industrial carbon capture infrastructure first, removal infrastructure second. Storage wells do not distinguish captured flue gas from captured air, and neither should be read as a license to slow fossil phase-out. The removal case for these basins rests on residual emissions only.

What to watch: whether the Helsinki Convention’s contracting parties put CO₂ storage on the agenda at their next ministerial. Until an amendment process starts, Europe’s storage map is being drawn by treaty vintage, not by rock.

Citations

  1. Carbon Herald — greenlit development funding for the Viking CCS project
  2. Negative Emissions — call to enable CO₂ storage in the Baltic Sea Region under the Helsinki Convention
  3. Europa — long-awaited ETS reform
  4. Cdrxiv — permitting pathway, not geology or cost, is now the rate-limiting step
  5. Bluesky — @fionaharvey.bsky.social on Bluesky — Bluesky post
  6. Bluesky — @drsimevans.carbonbrief.org on Bluesky — Bluesky post
  7. Europa — 50 Mt per year 2030 storage target