The US energy company Chevron describes it as the world’s largest industrial carbon dioxide injection project of its kind. But it has a problem. It still isn’t working as promised and the results are getting worse.
The $3bn Gorgon carbon capture and storage (CCS) development, on Barrow Island off Western Australia’s Pilbara coast, was supposed to start operating in 2016, backed by $60m in federal government funding. Chevron and its partners in the project, including Shell and ExxonMobil, said it would capture up to 4m tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) from an underwater gas field each year and inject it in a reservoir more than 2km beneath the island.
It was supposed to cut the direct greenhouse gas emissions from the Gorgon liquified natural gas (LNG) development by 40%. Nearly 10 years on, this is yet to happen.
The LNG facility was completed in 2017 and recently secured a $3bn expansion. But the CCS project was repeatedly delayed due to technical problems. It didn’t start operation until August 2019. After a reasonably successful first 10 months, the amount of CO2 being injected under the island has been shrinking year-on-year.
Data released by Chevron last month revealed only 1.33m tonnes was injected under Barrow Island last financial year, down from 1.59m tonnes in 2023-24, and 1.72m tonnes the year before.
Critics say it is further evidence that CCS is not delivering, despite billions of dollars in funding commitments over decades, and even as industry and political leaders – including the Australian government and opposition – back it as an answer to limiting heat-trapping emissions from fossil fuels.
Chevron says the problem is not with the technology itself, but the need to carefully manage the pressure levels in the geological reservoir under the island. A Chevron Australia spokesperson says the company is “progressing projects to optimise the pressure management system”, but work has stopped at two CO2 injection sites while work has been done to ensure it can be safely managed.
“While we have continued to store as much carbon dioxide as we safely can during this period, carbon dioxide injection rates have decreased,” the Chevron spokesperson says. “Once project works are complete, we will continue our condition-based approach to increase injection rates over time.”
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Kevin Morrison, an analyst with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, says whatever the cause, the development is now only half as effective as it was five years ago and is getting “worse by the year”. “The results are obviously underwhelming. It just calls into question the viability of all CCS projects at scale,” he says.
Even if the problems can be fixed, Morrison says the Gorgon CCS development will bury less than 3% of the total emissions that result from the development if those released after the LNG is shipped and burned overseas are included. “It underlines that CCS should be in no way treated as a climate solution,” he says.
‘Barely registers on the climate scoreboard’
Gorgon is one of two significant CCS developments in Australia. The other is Santos’ Moomba project in north-eastern South Australia, where CO2 is being injected into depleted onshore oil and gas wells, again with federal support. Santos last month received more than 614,000 carbon credits – worth about $22m – for gas injected underground in its first six months of operation.
The Japanese oil and gas giant Inpex is proposing what would be Australia’s largest carbon capture facility off the Northern Territory. If successful, the Bonaparte CCS development would involve piping and storing up to 10m tonnes of CO2 a year through Darwin harbour to an underground aquifer about 250km west of the NT capital.
The technology has the support of the Australian government, although it cut and redirected funding for CCS after its election in 2022, and the climate change minister, Chris Bowen, has warned it is “not the answer to all our problems”. Speaking in Osaka in October, the resources minister, Madeleine King, said CCS was “part of the solution” and “reaching net zero will be virtually impossible without it”.
King told the Japanese audience she had granted 10 permits for companies to explore for offshore CO2 burial sites last year, and the Bonaparte CCS development had been granted major project status, a step designed to help get it get approved and operating. “We must do everything in our power to ensure the technology becomes as effective as possible,” she concluded.
But experts have doubts about how effective it can really be. Climate advocates and some analysts say CCS has in practice been little more than greenwashing – used to justify fossil fuel expansion despite only a tiny proportion of emissions being captured and stored.
According to a recent report by the Global CCS Institute, there are 77 CCS projects in operation. About half are for “enhanced oil recovery”, which means the greenhouse gas is pumped underground to help extract more oil, a process that further adds to the climate crisis.
A separate report by academics at Imperial College London last month found 383m tonnes of CO2 have been stored underground since 1996. Dr Martin Jagger, a consultant and CCS supporter who worked on the technology for Shell, says this proves it can work technically and safely, but shows its backers needed to be honest that it remains a marginal technology that “still barely registers on the climate scoreboard”.
The total amount of emissions stored in nearly 30 years equates to just 10 days of global pollution. Annual storage now is still only about 45m tonnes – 0.1% of global climate pollution. Jagger says this is “nowhere near a climate-relevant scale yet”.
“If we don’t confront that reality, sooner or later the public purse will stop paying for activities that look busy, but remain climatically irrelevant,” he wrote.
More than 700 CCS developments have been announced, but Jagger says most haven’t secured financial support, cancellation rates have accelerated and operating systems routinely do not capture as much CO2 as promised.
The Global CCS Institute did not respond to a request for an interview, but independent experts in Australia have found the technology’s potential has been overstated.
The Climate Change Authority, a government agency, considered the role CCS could play in its advice to the government on a national 2035 emissions-reduction target. The authority chair, Matt Kean, told a Senate estimates hearing that “people were very bullish” about the role CCS could play, but the evidence did not support them.
“When we investigated it further with the scientists and a number of the industry participants, I think the ambitions of that technology did not meet the contribution that it could actually make towards emissions reduction,” Kean said.
Morrison says the political support for CCS, despite its limited results, can at least partly be explained by the enduring lobbying power of the oil and gas industry.
“They’re able to get into the ear of government,” he says. “But renewable energy, now more than ever, is cheaper than fossil fuels – and certainly cheaper than fossil fuels with CCS.”
