French oil major TotalEnergies has sold part of its stake in Denmark's Bifrost carbon capture and storage project to CarbonVault, an affiliate of German cement producer Schwenk, it said on Thursday.
Schwenk will become a future customer of Bifrost, storing its future CO2 emissions under the Danish North Sea. Bifrost aims to store three million tonnes of CO2 annually from 2027, rising to five million tonnes per year by 2030.
TotalEnergies retains a 45 per cent interest in the two offshore storage licenses, with CarbonVault holding 35 per cent and Denmark's state-backed Norsofonden holding 20 per cent.
It did not disclose the value of the transaction.
TotalEnergies is aiming to lower its debt levels by year-end with a series of sales to bring in some $3.5 billion, CEO Patrick Pouyanne told investors on Monday. He also announced a $7.5 billion savings program that will include trimming spending on low-carbon businesses.
The French firm is a shareholder in several projects to store CO2 in depleted gas fields in the North Sea, including Norway's Northern Lights.
Interest in largely government-subsidised projects to store CO2 underground has cooled, as European industrial sites have not built costly installations to capture their CO2 emissions.
Northern Lights, for example, became operational in October 2024 but did not receive its first shipment of CO2 from paying customers until August 2025.
Denmark has set a target of reaching “net zero” local emissions by 2045 and sees CO2 storage as key to that plan.
(Reporting by America Hernandez in Paris Editing by Tomasz Janowski)
