Major energy producers worldwide are tapping into the potential of carbon capture and storage (CCS) for curbing their emissions footprint. However, the method isn’t picking up as swiftly as needed to curb climate change because critical projects have been hitting cost overruns and technical issues.
According to the International Energy Agency, only a fraction of the approximately 51 billion tons of total yearly emissions is sequestered. There are 21 operating facilities worldwide, capturing about 40 million tons of carbon dioxide every year. Fortunately, companies haven’t given up hope on the solution, and many new projects are currently under development.
A partnership between Australia’s Perth-based Transborders Energy Pty and Japan’s Tokyo Gas Co. and Kyushu Electric Power Co. is proposing to store the emissions from the heavy industry under the seabed off the coast of Australia. The companies study plans to capture carbon dioxide from industrial emitters across the Asia-Pacific region and then ship the material to a floating hub out at sea (a technology already being used in the gas sector). From there, it will be injected under the ocean floor. The project is expected to capture and store 1.5 million tons annually.
The proposed project will be the first of its kind in the southern hemisphere. However, it isn’t the first project looking to deploy CCS technology offshore, just one of the few. It’s a more complicated procedure because of the additional piping required, but global scientists are increasingly looking into the method because there’s less competition for land.
Alex Zapantis, thinktank Global CCS Institute’s general manager, said:
Developing projects at sea does have a higher cost of drilling, and there’s typically a need to install new pipelines…[but] you’re not dealing with competition for onshore land. Often there’s a lot of good geological data that’s been collected for oil and gas exploration that gives you an enormous head start in terms of the primary data necessary to identify the prospective areas.
There’s another project in Australia called CarbonNet doing the same thing, aiming to be operational by the end of the decade. It’s shooting to store up to 5 million tons of carbon dioxide annually in the Bass Strait, off Australia’s southeast coast.
A similar project in Europe called the Northern Lights initiative – backed by the Norwegian government, Equinor ASA, Total SERoyal, and Dutch Shell Plc – plans to sequester 1.5 million tons of CO2 a year under the North Sea by 2024. It’s looking to scale up the operation to 5 million tons eventually.
Australia is among the biggest per-capita emitters, a result of its booming energy export industry. As such, the government promotes budding CCS as one of the top five technologies to drive down emissions. The technology has only been employed onshore until now.
A couple of onshore projects include Chevron Corp.’s CCS project at the Gorgon LNG plant off the Western Australia coast and Santos Ltd.’s facility at its Moomba gas processing plant in South Australia. Chevron’s project is one of the world’s most significant CCS projects, and it finally went online in 2019 after years of delay. The Santos project isn’t online yet but should bury 1.7 million tons of carbon dioxide a year when operational. Recently, Santos announced a partnership opportunity with Mitsubishi Corp. involving the Moomba project and potentially offsetting emissions from the Barossa liquefied natural gas project.
As more projects such as these go online and prove successful, CCS should catch on fast. The need to reduce emissions will only escalate from here on out.
