In Australia, a plan to bury Asia’s carbon emissions under the sea

Name: Japan aims to be carbon neutral by 2050, says Prime Minister Suga
Uploaded: 2020-12-07T01:28:38.000Z
Duration: 1 min 43 s
Description: Japan aims to be carbon neutral by 2050, says Prime Minister Suga

Australian and Japanese companies are working on plans to inject 1.5 million tonnes of carbon emissions under the seabed every year

Carbon capture and storage could help companies curb their emissions footprints, but the method has been slow to get off the ground

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A man walks past a power station in China’s Anhui province. Major energy producers have championed carbon capture and storage as a means to curb emissions footprints. Photo: Reuters

Bloomberg

Published: 9:28am, 7 Dec 2020Updated: 9:28am, 7 Dec 2020

Australian and Japanese companies are studying plans to capture carbon dioxide from industrial emitters in Asia and store it under the ocean floor off the coast of Australia.

Perth-based Transborders Energy Pty is working with partners including Tokyo Gas Co. and Kyushu Electric Power Co. on proposals to ship emissions from heavy industry in Australia and potentially across the Asia-Pacific region, and use a floating hub – technology currently deployed in the gas sector – to inject the material under the seabed.

Major energy producers have championed carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a means to curb their emissions footprint, but the method has been slow to gain traction as key projects have been hit by technical issues and cost overruns.

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Japan aims to be carbon neutral by 2050, says Prime Minister Suga

This year about 40 million tonnes of carbon dioxide will be captured across the world’s 21 operating facilities, according to the International Energy Agency, a fraction of total emissions of about 51 billion tonnes. The Australian project plans to capture 1.5 million tonnes a year.

Global scientists are increasingly looking to deploy CCS technology offshore. The Northern Lights initiative, backed by the Norwegian government, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Equinor ASA and Total SE, plans to store 1.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year under the North Sea as soon as 2024, with long-term plans to scale up the operation to 5 million tonnes.

“You’re not dealing with competition for onshore land,” said Alex Zapantis, general manager, commercial at the Global CCS Institute, a think tank which promotes the deployment of the technology. “Often there’s a lot of good geological data that’s been collected for the purpose of oil and gas exploration, that gives you an enormous head start in terms of the primary data necessary to identify the prospective areas.”

Developing projects at sea does have a higher cost of drilling, and there’s typically a need to install new pipelines, Zapantis said.