Santos, CSIRO aim to suck greenhouse gases from the Australian sky

“We are talking several hundreds of dollars a tonne,” Professor Howden said last week.

“It’s much cheaper to reduce your emissions in the first place, and you can do it much cheaper than hundreds of dollars a tonne.”

Carbon-capture and storage has also become a hugely divisive area of climate policy in Australia. Supporters of CCS argue it is a necessary and unavoidable component of the world’s decarbonisation goals to avoid the worst and most immediate impacts of global warming. The International Energy Agency says carbon capture projects are needed now to start reducing the pollution from difficult-to-abate industrial processes like cement production.

However, CCS is strongly opposed by the Greens and environmentalists who argue it is diverting focus and funding from the massive research and development push needed to switch to clean fuel sources, and fear it could be used to prolong the existence of fossil fuels in the economy.

There are also fresh questions about the technology’s prospects of functioning at scale after Chevron’s giant Gorgon CCS project in Western Australia this year failed to meet a crucial target of capturing and burying at least 80 per cent of the carbon dioxide released from its gas reservoirs, despite several years of work and spending more than $3 billion.

Santos’s proposed Moomba CCS project would have the capacity to store 1.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year from 2024, making it one of the biggest projects in the world with the lowest unit costs. The company said it could eventually have the capacity to stash as much as 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

Despite problems at nearby Gorgon, Woodside announced on Friday it would work with BP, Mitsui and Mitsubishi to investigate the potential to capture carbon dioxide from industries on the Pilbara’s Burrup Peninsula and store it in offshore reservoirs.

CSIRO energy director Marita Niemelae said the agency believed carbon-capture technologies would play a vital role in the transition to net-zero emissions.

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“By collaborating with industry, we can demonstrate key technologies at scale, ensuring superior performance and economics,” Dr Niemelae said.

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