Carbon Loop #022
A newsletter by the CCUSNA dedicated to highlighting the Australian carbon capture, utilisation and storage industry.
WA’s cheapest path runs through capture
When a state’s peak business body models the cheapest route to net zero, you expect the answer to be wind, solar and transmission. So it is worth noticing that the Chamber of Commerce and Industry WA has found the cheapest route runs through carbon capture instead. Its new report tested five scenarios for Western Australia’s energy future, and of the pathways that actually reach net zero by 2050, the lowest-cost was the one built around accelerated CCUS.
That finding inverts the usual framing. CCUS is normally treated as an expensive add-on; something to reluctantly accept because some emissions are too stubborn to abate any other way. The CCIWA modelling suggests the opposite for WA. That is, given WA’s industrial base and its geology, moving early on CCUS is not the premium option but rather the cheapest way to keep industry competitive and emissions going down.
Some snips:
“WA has the geological ability to utilise CCUS on a significant and economic scale. This will help protect exports, decarbonise local industry and provide a hub for the Asia-Pacific region.”
and
“In terms of geology, WA also has the potential to be a leader in carbon storage for local industry and customers in the Asia Pacific.”
Reckoning with the critique
Two pieces worth reading landed. You will guess which I’m more fond of.
ProPublica ran a long ‘investigation’ under a blunt headline: carbon capture cannot solve climate change. Days later, Noah Deich, who has spent his career building the carbon removal field, replied that capture may currently be a poor solution, but it’s not a false one.
The ProPublica case should be taken seriously rather than merely waved away. Its numbers are sobering. Scaling capture to the levels some models assume would require tens of thousands of miles (which, as someone who grew up with the makes-much-more-sense metric system, I understand to be about 0.4 of penny-fathom) of new pipeline, thousands of new storage sites, a shipping fleet that barely exists yet, and spending that runs into the hundreds of billions a year. Set against that, the volumes actually stored so far are, well, not that impressive. When CCUS technologies are sold as a licence to keep emitting carbon at today’s rate, critiques like ProPublica’s may be correct, and the industry does itself no favours by overpromising.
But Deich’s reply is the more useful one. Because it refuses the binary so often put forward by CCUS critics. My position (and only my opinion .. not necessarily the position of the CCUSNA, my employer(s), my client(s), my family, my cat etc) has always been that CCUS is not a substitute for building out renewables or simply reducing usage of highly-emitting products and services.
But the world needs ammonia, cement, steel, and plastics. There is no clean electricity solution for these products feasible today. Chemistry does not care about our preferences. Or our politics.
More than 380 million tonnes of CO2 have been stored in verified projects since 1996, and CO2 has moved safely through pipelines for decades. The honest position is neither that capture saves us nor that it is a fraud. It is one of a handful of technologies that genuinely hard-to-abate sectors will need, and the important work we should be focussed on is making these technologies stack up, rather than trying to win petty arguments on the internet.
Why carbon capture and storage won’t fix our climate crisis
Carbon capture is a shitty solution to climate change, but not a false one
Two Plugs
First, one for you Eastern States folks, waking up early with your fancy coffees ..
If you are anywhere near Melbourne next week, the Carbon Capture APAC Summit runs at the MCEC on 8 and 9 July. I will be there. What more do you need??
The programme ‘… moves from the policy questions through to the practical ones: how national and state settings actually turn into financeable projects, how shared infrastructure brings costs down, and how capital and carbon markets start moving at the scale this needs’. There is a technology exhibition, a start-up innovation challenge, and plenty of room to meet the people building this out.
Details and registration are at carboncaptureapac.com.
And for those who love sunsets over the Ocean ..
CCUS Network Australia holds its next Technical Talk on 28 July, and this one is open to everyone. It presents the findings of the WA CCUS Hubs Workshop that CCUSNA convened in February, where 100 people from industry, government and research spent two days on a single question: what it would take to build a multi-user CCUS hub in Western Australia, across the Kwinana, Mid West and Pilbara regions.
Chair Rosie Johnstone will walk through the key learnings from the workshop and the webinar series that led into it, followed by Q&A and networking drinks. The workshop and its report are among the most significant CCUS efforts in WA in recent years, so if you are in Perth, this is surely one to get to.
It runs from 5.00 to 7.30pm on 28 July at the Baby Shoe, Shoe Bar, Yagan Square, Perth. Tickets are $45 for members and $60 for non-members. Bookings are on Humanitix, and the event is up on LinkedIn if you would like to share it on.
🌏 Global CCUS momentum ..
🇦🇺 Australia & Asia-Pacific
⚖️ Western Australia’s onshore CO₂-storage framework comes into force — WA’s Petroleum Legislation Amendment Act 2024 commenced on 28 May 2026, and with its supporting Greenhouse Gas Injection and Storage Regulations 2026 now gazetted, the state has for the first time a working regulatory regime for the transport and permanent geological storage of captured CO₂ onshore. With some of Australia’s most prospective storage geology, WA is positioning itself to lead the country and the wider Asia-Pacific on CCS. Read more
⚖️ Woodside’s Browse CCS component to face EPBC scrutiny — Canberra will assess the entire $48.7bn Browse project, with the CCS element examined specifically under the strengthened EPBC Act — a test of how offshore CO₂ injection and storage, historically a regulatory grey zone, will be treated under the tightened regime. Read more
🇪🇺 Europe
💶 Denmark puts ~DKK 16.5bn (~US$2.6bn) behind cement carbon capture — One of Europe’s largest single industrial-CCS awards will fund Aalborg Portland’s ACCSION project to capture, transport and permanently store up to 1.25 Mt CO₂/year from 2030 under a 15-year agreement with the Danish Energy Agency. Air Liquide supplies the capture technology and Harbour Energy the transport and storage — a full onshore-to-offshore chain expected to deliver more than half of Denmark’s national CCS subsidy target. Read more
🇩🇪 Germany puts €5bn behind carbon capture — Berlin has moved from hesitation to mainstream CCS policy with a €5bn Carbon Contracts for Difference scheme (€3bn base allocation plus a €2bn flexible top-up) offering 15-year contracts that cover the cost gap between low-carbon and conventional production for steel, cement, chemicals and refining. New KSpTG legislation explicitly opens a support pathway for CCS and CCU — a decisive signal from Europe’s largest industrial economy that lands alongside Denmark’s ACCSION award. Read more
⚖️ EU’s Article 23 CO₂-storage mandate heads to court — The Net-Zero Industry Act requires 44 obligated oil and gas producers to develop 50 Mt/year of CO₂ injection capacity by 2030 — the first time the EU has put a binding storage obligation on private emitters. That obligation is now being contested: fifteen legal challenges from twelve groupings of producers across eight member states, together more than 65% of the total target, dispute the methodology and the COVID-era 2020–23 production reference period. The Article 23 Watch consortium (Carbon Balance Initiative, Clean Air Task Force, Bellona) argues the 2030 target remains achievable, with Shell, Eni and TotalEnergies on track if announced projects proceed. Read more
♻️ First biogenic CO₂ from wastewater permanently stored under the North Sea — Carbon-removal firm Inherit has begun shipping biogenic CO₂ captured at Veas — Norway’s largest wastewater-treatment plant, serving 800,000+ people around Oslo — to the Northern Lights terminal at Øygarden for injection 2,600 m beneath the seabed. Under a two-year pilot Northern Lights will take up to 7,000 t/year. Because the CO₂ is biogenic, the chain delivers genuine carbon removal rather than avoided emissions — an early template for engineered removals riding shared transport-and-storage infrastructure. Read more
🤝 UK and Belgium sign cross-border CO₂-transport MoU — A Memorandum of Understanding signed in Brussels enables CO₂ to move between Belgium and the UK for permanent geological storage under the North Sea. The agreement aligns permitting across the two jurisdictions and clears a London Protocol hurdle on CO₂ import/export, allowing hard-to-abate Belgian industrial CO₂ (chemicals, steel, cement) to travel by pipeline or ship to UK storage. Read more
🌐 Global industry & tech
🔧 Wood Group targets carbon capture for fired equipment — An engineering insight on retrofitting carbon capture to furnaces and heaters — the fired-equipment slice of industrial emissions that is among the hardest to abate and often overlooked next to power and cement. Read more
❌ Air Products scraps its $4.5bn Louisiana Clean Energy Complex — Air Products has cancelled what would have been its largest-ever US investment — a blue-hydrogen complex pairing natural-gas reforming with carbon capture and permanent CO₂ storage under Lake Maurepas — taking a pretax charge of up to $2.9bn, alongside a cancelled zero-carbon liquid-hydrogen plant in Arizona. The company cited returns that failed its “stringent” criteria, challenging commercial conditions and a slower-than-expected hydrogen market. A sobering counterpoint to Europe’s policy momentum: CCS-linked blue hydrogen still lives or dies on project economics. Read more
💰 Eni CCUS Holding widens its project-finance base — Eni CCUS Holding, with strategic partner Global Infrastructure Partners (a BlackRock company), is broadening the financing sources behind its platform of CCS projects — a signal of deepening institutional-capital appetite for CCS at scale. Read more
🛡️ Insurance emerges as an overlooked enabler for large-scale CCS — As CCS moves from pilots to commercial scale, projects carry a blend of construction, operational, environmental, financial and regulatory exposures that traditional energy insurance was never built to hold. Chief among them is the long-tail liability for CO₂ leakage or seepage from a store that has to stay sealed for centuries. Dedicated CCS insurance solutions are now appearing, covering leakage-related environmental damage and lost revenue and plugging a gap that can otherwise stall project finance. A critical piece of making CCS bankable, and one still largely absent from the mainstream conversation. Read more
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