Carbon Loop #019
A newsletter by the CCUSNA dedicated to highlighting the Australian carbon capture, utilisation and storage industry.
I considered a big silly headline to recognise today’s date, but the world’s silly enough right now without more April Fools knockin’ about.
Australian Government opens Carbon Capture Technologies Program Round 2 ..
I’m very happy to finally be able to point to a Federal Government initiative aimed specifically at supporting CCUS!
The CCTP’s second round offers $32.6 million for emerging CO₂ capture, use and removal technologies, with grants of up to $10 million for pilot and demonstration projects in hard-to-abate sectors. Applications close 6 May 2026.
It’s a promising start. It just needs to be much, much bigger in scale and ambition.
Funding for carbon capture, utilisation and removal technologies
CSIRO CO₂ Utilisation State of Play report ..
Australia’s chief science organisation, the CSIRO, has updated its assessment of CO₂ utilisation opportunities to find that Australia could unlock a $13 billion domestic market for CO₂-derived products by 2050, including methanol, SAF, urea and mineral aggregates. The report maps industry activity and demand-side signals across maritime, aviation and construction sectors.
The ‘U’ in CCUS often gets overlooked as the geologists take over the discussion, but it’s the part of the industry that I’m most excited about. Permanent geological storage is great and all, and it allows oil and gas executives to make self-deprecating jokes about how they’re really just humble ‘waste disposal’ workers, but wouldn’t we rather capture CO₂ and make cool stuff with it?
Sovereign capacity and supply chain resilience are buzzwords likely to get more airtime over the next few months. Could carbon management infrastructure preserve existing industry and build new industry to help us fend for ourselves?
CO₂ Utilisation in Australia: State of Play
Rod Sims makes the case for carbon pricing reform
Not CCUS-specific, but I enjoyed reading former ACCC chair Rod Sims argue that Australia’s current policy settings are insufficient to achieve our national ambitions, and that a carbon price is the most efficient decarbonisation mechanism available.
I suspect others, much smarter than I am, have good reason for speaking against a national carbon price. And that’s fair enough. But, speaking as someone trying to put together major decarbonisation projects, it’s hard to ignore that the current low market price for ACCUs makes it very difficult to defend a business case for major industrial decarbonisation investment.
The Superpower Institute’s proposed Carbon Solutions Levy would tax fossil fuel production and use proceeds to accelerate the transition — which will no doubt raise arguments around sovereign risk. But the Safeguard Mechanism is already here. We’re way past sovereign risk. Now we need to figure out who’s going to pay for it.
📅 CCUSNA Perth: “Energy Transition and Emissions Reductions — Some Inconvenient Truths” — Martin Wilkes of RISC Advisory presents on the gap between net-zero ambitions and energy reality, covering lesser-known facts about the changes in energy consumption required to significantly cut emissions. It’s happening tonight — 1 April 2026, The Shoe Bar, Perth — be there or be square. (Read more)
🌏 Global CCUS momentum ..
🇦🇺 Australia & Asia-Pacific
👷 UTS/CSIRO: Building a workforce for novel CDR in Australia — A first-of-its-kind report on current and future workforce needs for scaling novel CDR technologies. It follows CSIRO’s CDR Roadmap, which identified capacity for up to 330 Mt of CO₂ removal per year by 2050. (Read more)
📈 Rystad Energy: APAC cross-border CCS gaining momentum — Rystad highlights Australia, Malaysia and Indonesia as emerging CCS hubs, driven by depleted reservoir storage potential. The region added more new CCUS projects last year than in any prior year, with Japan and South Korea forging cross-border alliances across the region. (Read more)
🚢 Malaysia and Japan advance cross-border CCS plan — Japan plans to ship captured CO₂ to offshore geological storage in Sarawak, in what would be Southeast Asia’s first cross-border CCS project. Petronas is leading a $1.1 billion offshore storage facility. Critics argue the approach risks delaying genuine decarbonisation. (Read more)
🤝 Chiyoda, NYK Line and KNCC sign MOU on global CCS — The three companies will collaborate on CCS projects in Japan and overseas, covering the full development cycle from concept studies through to EPC. The MOU builds on a 2024 joint study evaluating costs and schedules for three liquefied CO₂ shipping modes. (Read more)
🛠️ Open-source CCS Compliance Navigator for Indonesia — A new web tool maps Indonesia’s full CCS regulatory framework into an interactive compliance tracker covering the entire project lifecycle. Covers seven regulations and standards including Perpres 14/2024 and relevant ISO/TC 265 standards. Super cool. (Read more)
⚖️ Guardian questions Australia’s CCS track record; Global CCS Institute responds — The Guardian questioned whether Australia has been “greenwashed” by CCS. The Global CCS Institute’s rebuttal argues that comparing cumulative CO₂ stored to total global emissions obscures CCS’s intended role in hard-to-abate sectors, pointing to 77 operating commercial projects worldwide. (Read more)
🇪🇺 Europe
🇩🇰 Denmark’s CCS tender: a stress-test for policy design — Denmark offered billions in CCS subsidies but demanded on-time delivery with hefty penalties. The result: Ørsted is already struggling with delays on its BECCS projects, and in the latest €4 billion funding round, 9 of 10 preselected applicants withdrew — all bioenergy or waste-to-energy operators. The withdrawals were driven not by lack of interest but by compressed timelines and design choices that prioritised political milestones over development realities. A cautionary tale about what happens when ambition outpaces project economics. (Read more — Hanno Böck) (Read more — OilPrice)
🏭 MHI on scaling CCUS from the UK to Europe — Mitsubishi Heavy Industries outlines its approach to scaling carbon capture across the UK and Europe, leveraging its KM CDR Process technology and discussing the role of industrial clusters and cross-border CO₂ transport. (Read more)
🏗️ Yara CEO: How to scale CCS and turn climate targets into action — Writing for the WEF ahead of Davos 2026, Yara’s CEO makes the case for CCS in ammonia and fertiliser production. Yara’s Sluiskil plant in the Netherlands will begin capturing up to 800,000 tonnes of CO₂ annually in 2026 for storage via the Porthos infrastructure. (Read more)
🌐 Global industry & tech
🔥 Climate Analytics: “Hard-to-abate” label used to justify delay — A report argues that the iron, steel and cement sectors’ use of the “hard-to-abate” label is scientifically inaccurate and politically counterproductive, serving to justify overreliance on CCUS and offsets rather than deploying available abatement measures. (Read more)
💨 Thomas Moore: Challenges facing DAC / Thermodynamics keeping DAC alive — Two LinkedIn Pulse articles examining the technical and economic hurdles confronting direct air capture, including energy intensity, cost barriers, and the thermodynamic fundamentals that underpin the technology. (Article One | Article Two)
🌍 Octavia Carbon secures offtake agreement via Carbon Direct — Kenya-based DAC company Octavia Carbon has secured a new offtake agreement supporting the scale-up of its Hummingbird pilot in the Kenyan Rift Valley, which captures atmospheric CO₂ using geothermal energy. (Read more)
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