We employ many geologists and geophysicists within the offshore and wind industry. These colleagues work on our locations all over Europe. Once a year they hold an internal conference where all of our specialists within that field meet. It is a day with professional knowledge sharing, new input and technologies, not to mention the great social networking and the possibility to get to know the individual professional areas of DONG Energy much better.
A little over four years ago, we embarked on the Castor project at the Esbjerg Power Plant. Every day, we have captured ½% of the smoke and removed more than 90% of the CO2. We have experimented extensively with temperatures and materials in the process. Our experiments were successful, and we managed to capture the CO2!
Cesar – the new experiment
With the new Cesar experiment, we have proceeded with a view to separating CO2 from large quantities of smoke. We believe that it will eventually become possible to purify the smoke emitted from power plants for CO2. By doing so, we can achieve the vision of the pollution neutral power plant!
Water with a temperature of more than 70 degrees has been located two or three kilometres into the Danish subsoil. This water runs through a stone layer, which was in fact a desert in prehistoric times, and which is now situated in Denmark’s subsoil!
CO2
We operate two well-functioning geothermal plants providing CO2-free contributions to the district heating for several thousand households in Thisted in North Jutland and on the island of Amager close to Copenhagen. We plan to build an even larger facility that will supply district heating for one-third of all households in the town of Sønderborg in southern Jutland.
District heating world champions DONG Energy is one of the global leaders when it comes to skills in project planning, construction and operation of state-of-the-art and effective power plants. In fact, we operate some of the world’s most effective power plants.
This is the result of years of dedicated efforts to generate fossil energy that is as environmentally compatible as possible while also being financially viable. If the power plants of other countries were replaced with new ones using the technology applied by DONG Energy, the aggregate global CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants could be reduced by approximately 30%.
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Off-shore windfarms – technology is progressing fast
Technology is advancing fast in off-shore windfarms, and we play a key role in this development.
We have build Horns Rev 2 in the North Sea off the coast of Esbjerg. This is currently the world’s biggest off-shore windfarm. We have selected a turbine on which the generator can be adjusted to match the wind conditions, which helps to optimise the power output. We use concrete – instead of steel – for the outer foundation platform as this offers better stability.
We have also found a new way of connecting the power cable that helps to achieve cost savings during the construction phase. The spate of new wind power projects in our pipeline, both in Denmark and abroad, bear witness to our strong market position.
DONG Energy has been working on wind power for many years, but there is still extensive scope for development. Wind turbine size is being regularly enhanced, wind turbines are being installed offshore, and wind turbine location is being scrutinised in order to optimise wind utilisation - factors that make more stringent demands on both turbines, foundations, access conditions, availability, operational control, management and maintenance. DONG Energy is putting a concerted effort into all these areas.
In the UK we are currently involved in the following offshore wind farms :
Burbo Bank offshore wind farm
Walney I & II off shore wind farm
London Array off shore wind farm
Gunfleet Sands off shore wind farm
Barrow off shore wind farm
The Westermost Rough off shore wind farm
We have wind power activities on several other locations. Some of them have their own web sites, see wind our wind section.
North Sea oil Surveys have shown that we are among the three best companies in the North Sea in terms of keeping production costs down. We also measure our performance in terms of the drillings performed to identify and produce oil from the subsoil. In this category, we are also one of the top performers!
Simultaneously with the strong financial results, we have constantly improved the safety of our operations, retaining intensive focus on minimising any environmental impact. We continue these efforts by seeking to extract even more from the fields, and we recently announced our “2020 Vision”, aimed at initiating a number of new steps to ensure that we can continue profitable production operations at least until 2020.