Santos will team with CSIRO on technology to strip carbon from the air

Santos will join forces with CSIRO in a bid to commercialise technology which can strip carbon dioxide out of the air.

Santos managing director Kevin Gallagher at the Moomba gas processing plant.

Santos will partner with the national science agency CSIRO on the development of technology to capture carbon emissions out of the air for storage or use.

The energy company will announce at the COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow that it will collaborate to develop CSIRO’s Carbon Assist technology into what it hopes could become the lowest-cost “direct air capture’’ technology in the world.

The project will involve four direct air capture units based at Moomba in South Australia’s Far North, with the carbon to be sequestered at Santos’s $220m carbon capture and storage project, which was given the go ahead earlier this week.

The CCS project will store about 1.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year in depleted oil and gas reservoirs, and is expected to be operational in 2024.

Santos successfully injected about 100 tonnes of CO2 as a proof of concept of Moomba CCS late last year, and made a final investment decision to go ahead with it this week, after the project was registered by the Clean Energy Regulator as eligible for Australian Carbon Credit Units.

Santos managing director Kevin Gallagher, who is attending the COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow, said the technology could also be used in post-combustion scenarios where there were higher concentrations of CO2.

“This technology literally has the potential to negate emissions elsewhere in the economy, especially in hard-to-abate sectors that Australia still needs to manufacture essential everyday products,’’ Mr Gallagher said.

“Products like cement, steel and the chemicals that are the building blocks of the clothes we wear, our medical equipment, the packaging we use for bread and milk, the pipes that carry our water, toothpaste, detergents and many other things.

“With Moomba CCS having capacity to store up to 20 million tonnes of CO2 every year for 50 years, Moomba could be a large-scale, commercial CCS hub not only reducing Santos’s emissions, but helping to cost-effectively negate emissions elsewhere in the Australian economy.”

CSIRO energy director Dr Marita Niemelae said CO2 capture technologies will play a

vital role in the transition to net-zero emissions.

“By collaborating with industry, we can demonstrate key technologies at scale, ensuring

superior performance and economics,” Dr Niemelae said.

“CSIRO has invested in CCS research for over 20 years, because of its potential for large-scale decarbonisation leading to emissions reduction and the creation of new industries.

“As Australia’s energy transition catalyst, CSIRO is ensuring a pathway to secure, affordable,

low-emissions energy for decades ahead.”

Speaking on the sidelines of the conference, Mr Gallagher said the company was pushing hard on the energy transition front.

“Santos’s strategies are very progressive. If you if you actually sit and look and look at what we’ve said, we’re doing what we’re telling the market we’re doing in terms of transitioning.

“There’s no other company that I know of in our sector globally, (that’s) got a more aggressive transition strategy than Santos.’’

Mr Gallagher said the company’s target of achieving net zero scope one and two emissions by 2040 was “industry-leading ... and we are committed to looking at new technologies and finding cost effective ways to reduce our emissions so that we can continue to supply affordable and cleaner energy to meet customer demand”.

This year Santos has also been articulating its hydrogen strategy, which the Moomba CCS project is a key element of.

Mr Gallagher said the transition to a hydrogen economy would be a “gradual build''.

“You will see the market start to develop, but we’re not all going to wake up one morning and the world’s converted to hydrogen. Many of the pipelines can take a little bit of hydrogen though, very few will be capable of transporting only hydrogen.’’

Mr Gallagher said Santos’s plan to make hydrogen from natural gas and store the CO2 is “actually a very, very low emissions way of manufacturing hydrogen, and it’s much lower cost today’’.

Mr Gallagher said making so-called “green” hydrogen economically using renewable energy was “probably still a decade away ... at best”.

“But we can make hydrogen today from natural gas with CCS with a very low emissions profile.

“And so we believe we can get it to market quicker, and we have an abundance of natural gas in Australia which becomes a competitive advantage on that landscape.’’