Carbon Loop #023
A newsletter by the CCUSNA dedicated to highlighting the Australian carbon capture, utilisation and storage industry.
Permits are not projects ..
Two years ago the Commonwealth moved to issue ten new offshore exploration permits, with joint ventures picking up acreage in the Carnarvon and Bonaparte basins. And the Resources Minister was unusually direct in her reasoning, noting that the IEA, CSIRO, the IPCC, and our own Climate Change Authority all identify carbon capture as necessary to our energy transition and achieving our climate goals. Two years on, those seventeen-odd permits have produced three declared storage formations — the most recent being Santos’s Reindeer, a potential 5 Mtpa store for third-party Pilbara emissions.
So, we have worked out how to kick off the exploration permits phase. And the WA Government has also recently gotten in on the action.
The difficulty is the next bit.
A permit gives you the right to look. It does not give you a project. And the gap between ‘hmm, this looks interesting’ and ‘commissioning achieved’ is measured in hundreds of millions of dollars. Heck, let’s call a spade a spade — it’s going to be billions of dollars.
So we should read those permit and declaration of storage announcements against the public funding support currently available. The Safeguard Transformation Stream is the Commonwealth’s flagship instrument for exactly the problem CCS Projects solve: trade-exposed facilities under the safeguard mechanism that must transform their business models to stay viable in a decarbonised world.
The Safeguard Transformation Stream offers up to $50 million of grant funding, capped at half of eligible project expenditure, and the batch now open has roughly $80 million to allocate across all applicants. Feasibility work is largely excluded. Projects must be complete by March 2033. Go forth and best of luck.
The STS numbers are not unreasonable if the ambition is to achieve an equipment upgrade, or a minor process improvement, and round one funded a sensible spread of exactly that kind of project. But these are a completely different category to industrial carbon management technologies, where the capital cost of a single facility runs to several hundred million and the engineering alone consumes years. Let alone the expenditure required for the adjacent stages in a new carbon management value chain - which probably has its own hundred-million-dollar commitment several times over.
A programme dedicated to offering support to the hard-to-abate industry, with a fund capable of delivering a fraction of the typical capture project’s capital cost, is not much of a sparkly ‘bridge to a better future’. It says, ‘… we want you to decarbonise your industry as soon as possible, but no not like that, and can’t you make it all a bit cheaper?’
And so we end up with 17 exploration permits and three declaration-of-storage-stage-projects. Oh, better make that two.
I should clarify, none of this whinge is an argument against the STS programme. We need good equipment upgrades too. We need more of all the help we can get. But it is an argument that our instruments and our ambition are not aligned. And I think that saying so plainly is more useful than pretending otherwise.
I don’t know too much about the merits of the Cliff Head Project. But I’m sad to see that Project now potentially go-under. And I’m disappointed it’s likely going to set the carbon management industry back further, as we work through the proper allocation of decommissioning liabilities and what went wrong, rather than building on the technical merits of how what they have there could help decarbonise industry in the WA Midwest.
I suspect I have said this before in these Carbon Loop Soapbox Sessions (great name for a cover band, by the way) but I will say it again: The world needs cement, steel, ammonia, and plastics. And all of these industries require some level of carbon management technologies if they are to decarbonise.
If Australia’s decarbonisation policy settings really require carbon management technologies at scale, and four separate authorities say they do, then public funding systems must be built to support the adoption of those carbon management technologies. And right now, they just aren’t there.
Worth your diary
The APAC Forum on Carbon Capture and Storage runs from 17 to 21 August in Adelaide, convened by the Global CCS Institute. Be there or be square.
When — 17 to 21 August 2026
Where — National Wine Centre, Adelaide, South Australia
Who — the Global CCS Institute, drawing government, project leaders, technology providers and service professionals from across the Asia Pacific and further afield
New this year — a two-day CCS 101 course on 17 and 18 August, aimed at people early in their CCS careers, running before the main programme
The conference proper — 19 to 21 August: plenaries, expert panels, Situation Room workshops on regulatory and technical questions, speed networking, an exhibition and site visits
Registration — through the event page.
🌏 Global CCUS momentum ..
🇦🇺 Australia & Asia-Pacific
⚖️ Reindeer becomes Australia’s third declared storage formation — Santos has secured a declaration of identified greenhouse gas storage formation over Reindeer, the depleted field off the northwest coast. The project is sized at up to 5 Mtpa and is offered as a carbon-management service to third-party Pilbara emitters rather than solely for Santos’s own CO2. Read more
🗞 CCUSNA launches the WA CCUS Hubs Report — The report from February’s WA CCUS Hubs Workshop was launched at Corrs Chambers Westgarth in Perth, with industry, government and research in the room. The WA hubs conversation has moved from workshop to published roadmap. Read more on LinkedIn
🌱 Airbridge named a finalist in the IFA Cultivate Challenge — The Perth CO2-to-fertiliser startup gets its technology in front of global fertiliser makers and users, chasing pilots and partnerships. Small, but a genuine WA carbon-utilisation story. Read more on LinkedIn
✈️ Qantas takes its SAF programme across the Tasman — Qantas spent time in Christchurch with New Zealand airport sustainability leads, talking through the renewable liquid fuels programme. Minor on its own, but a trans-Tasman SAF signal worth watching. Read more on LinkedIn
🤝 WA Agent General chairs a hydrogen panel in Rotterdam — At the World Hydrogen Summit, with Murchison Green Hydrogen and InterContinental Energy giving a candid account of what it takes to move WA renewable hydrogen projects past ambition. Export positioning into the European market. Read more on LinkedIn
📈 Moomba past two million tonnes — Santos reported that the onshore South Australian project has permanently sequestered 2 Mt CO2-e in a little over eighteen months, against a nameplate of 1.7 Mtpa subject to CO2 availability. Whatever your view of CCS, let’s acknowledge this plant is doing what it said it would. Read more
🤝 Carbon Capture APAC Summit draws over 700 to Melbourne — The 8 and 9 July summit brought together government, industry and finance. The framing worth noting is regional rather than national: Australia, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Southeast Asia are increasingly treating CCUS as a driver of regional cooperation and industrial competitiveness, not solely as an abatement tool. Read more
🤝 Yara Pilbara signs a skills MoU with the Clean Energy Skills National Centre of Excellence — Announced by WA Energy and Decarbonisation Minister Amber-Jade Sanderson, the MoU uses the Pilbara ammonia site as a training resource, with priority on participation by Aboriginal people and women. Read more
📚 Global CCS Institute publishes State of the Art: CCS Technologies 2026 — The Institute’s technology review landed in July, with a webinar on the findings on 23 July. Read more
🇪🇺 Europe
🚢 Northern Lights completes its phase 1 fleet — The fourth CO2 tanker, Northern Purpose, arrived in Norway on 29 July, completing the shipping capacity for the 1.5 Mtpa first phase in the Norwegian North Sea. Read more
🗣️ CCSA EU Conference, Brussels — The reported theme was the shift from ambition to execution, which is either progress or a phrase conferences reach for when execution is the problem. Judge for yourself. Read more
🌐 Global industry & tech
🏭 Cement capture has moved from “does it work” to “can it scale” — The Stockholm Environment Institute notes the cement-capture conversation has shifted: the technology question is largely settled, with projects at commercial scale or in late design, and what remains is structural. A balanced read on where cement CCUS actually sits. Read more
📉 The best reply yet to the anti-capture case — Noah Deich’s two-part response to ProPublica: capture is a poor solution but not a false one, and part two asks whether carbon removal fares any better. Non-tribal, and more useful than either side of the usual argument. Read more
📉 “Climate folks, we’re better than this” — Carbonfuture’s Sebastian Manhart rebuts a viral ProPublica-derived infographic that conflates CCS and CDR capacity projections, arguing the climate community does itself damage with misleading charts. The removals-side companion to the Deich piece above. Read more on LinkedIn
📉 IEAGHG’s Tim Dixon pushes back on Monbiot — Dixon argues that Monbiot and Boswell’s Guardian column contradicts the conclusions of the IPCC, the UK Climate Change Committee and the IEA, and points to no-regrets applications such as waste-to-energy capture. Worth reading alongside the two above. Read more on LinkedIn
🧮 SBTi’s updated target calculator assumes very little carbon removal — Robert Höglund ran mock sectoral-pathway values through the new tool and found it leaves minimal residual emissions for CDR by 2050. Quietly significant for anyone forecasting corporate removal demand. Read more on LinkedIn
🎙 What kind of petrostate is the US, really? — Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay join David Roberts on US industrial policy and climate politics. Context for the policy vacuum where American 45Q and DOE news would normally sit. Read more
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