Santos is forging ahead with its Moomba CCS project but says more needs to be done

Santos says there’s a growing consensus that carbon capture and storage will be integral to net zero ambitions, as its Moomba CCS project ticks off another milestone.

Brett Woods, Santos energy solutions president, at the Moomba carbon capture and storage site. Picture: Supplied

Santos’s carbon capture and storage project at the Moomba gas hub is 60 per cent complete and on track to start storing carbon dioxide next year.

The Adelaide energy company said about $30m worth of critical equipment had arrived in South Australia this month and was making its way to site.

The update on the program, originally costed at $US165m, comes as the nation’s major energy players gather in Adelaide this week for the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association’s annual conference, where the need to ramp up CCS investment to meet net zero goals will be a major theme.

Santos energy solutions president, Brett Woods, on site at Moomba on Monday, said the company’s first CCS project would be able to store up to 1.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year in depleted oil and gas reservoirs.

“Once complete, the project will support Santos to reduce our own emissions but crucially, we’re also working with other hard-to-abate sectors to look at ways of using Moomba CCS to help reduce their emissions, too,” Mr Woods said.

“With the turbine and compressor expected to arrive in Moomba any day now, we’re excited

to continue the strong progress we’re making so we can inject CO2 into the depleted

reservoirs from next year.’’

Mr Woods said a trial of direct air capture technology, which aimed to strip CO2 out of the air, would also begin soon.

“In the next six weeks we’ll have a direct air capture facility being installed here and that will work for nine months trialling our new technology for direct air capture – you can see globally a lot of interest in this technology and it’s something that South Australia and Santos are proudly being a leader in,’’ Mr Woods said.

“Our target price for direct air capture, working with the CSIRO, was $US75 a tonne – our trial plant will look at reducing those costs through energy efficiency initiatives.’’

Mr Woods said there was a growing consensus that CCS would be a critical technology needed to hit net zero goals.

“The International Energy Agency and all the major institutes have indicated that CCS is critical for the world to reach net zero – we’re talking about a 1600 per cent increase in CCS projects required to meet our 1.5 degree climate ambitions,’’ he said.

“I think if people understood the ability of organisations such as Santos to permanently store and abate carbon emissions, they’d get a much better understanding of the potential of CCS.’’

The Moomba project is Santos’s first CCS project under development, while the company recently signed four memoranda of understanding for the proposed storage of CO2 emissions from third parties at the Bayu-Undan CCS project, offshore Timor-Leste.

A third project aiming to store CO2 offshore Western Australia is also being considered.

The federal Climate Change Authority has been advocating for more support for the CCS sector, while APPEA is lobbying for the creation of what it calls “net-zero ­industrial zones”, where shared infrastructure for CCS could be built and used.

Speakers at the APPEA conference on Tuesday include former Reserve Bank of Australia governor and current Macquarie Group chair Glenn Stevens and federal Minister for Resources and Northern Australia Madeleine King.