Germany has signed bilateral CO2 export agreements with Denmark and the Netherlands, clearing a path for German carbon removal developers to access permanent storage sites outside the country and build a cross-border carbon transport infrastructure in Northern Europe.

The two agreements were signed during the Strategic Dialogue of the Carbon Management Forum, held in Berlin on October 5–6. Signatories were Hester Somsen, Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands; Thomas Østrup Møller, Ambassador of the Kingdom of Denmark; and Frank Wetzel, State Secretary at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.

Why does storage access matter for carbon removal?

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies only deliver climate-relevant results once captured CO2 is locked away. After capture, operators must either purify the gas for industrial repurposing or inject it into permanent storage sites that prevent its release back into the atmosphere over long timescales.

The bottleneck is geographic. Germany's CDR sector needs storage capacity, and the new agreements point to Danish and Dutch sites as the destination for exported CO2. The deals cover the technology families that depend on permanent storage to scale:

• Direct Air Capture and Carbon Storage (DACCS)
• Biogenic Carbon Capture and Storage (BioCCS)
• Removals from other biogenic CO2 streams

Carbon removals are treated in German and EU climate policy as a complementary measure to emissions reductions, and policymakers expect them to play a role in hitting climate targets on schedule. That timeline depends on deployment volumes far above today's levels — the source material notes these technologies must operate at a much larger scale to make a measurable dent in the global CO2 footprint.

What does the sector say?

Stefan Schlosser, CEO of Deutscher Verband für negative Emissionen e.V. (DVNE), underlined that the export agreements with Denmark and the Netherlands are important for the CDR sector, pointing out that German carbon removal companies need access to permanent CO2 storage.

His framing matches the structural constraint the agreements address: without a legal and logistical route to move captured CO2 across borders, German CDR projects cannot contract storage capacity abroad, and project finance stalls.

How does this fit the wider cross-border CO2 network?

The Germany–Denmark–Netherlands arrangements follow parallel moves elsewhere in Europe. Belgium and the UK have signed their own agreement to enable cross-border CO2 storage, and Gasunie and partners are advancing plans for a cross-border CO2 network that would link capture sites, transport lines and storage terminals across the region.

Together, these instruments sketch the outline of a Northern European carbon management corridor: capture in industrial clusters, transport via pipeline networks, and permanent storage in depleted fields and saline aquifers under the North Sea. The October 5–6 signings add the German demand side to that map.

What happens next?

The agreements lay the foundation rather than the finished infrastructure. No tonnage capacity, transport volume or storage allocation attaches to the signing itself; the deals establish the cooperative framework under which German CO2 can move to Danish and Dutch storage.

The milestone that decides commercial scaling is the translation of these government-to-government agreements into project-level transport and storage contracts — the point at which DACCS, BioCCS and biogenic-stream removal developers can book permanent capacity with defined start dates. Until those contracts materialize, the region's CDR sector holds storage access on paper but not yet in tonnes.