Last week, more than 1,000 delegates gathered in Perth for what they describe as world’s leading carbon capture and storage (CCS) conference. Australian Energy Producers are co-sponsors and their chief executive told them Australia is “at the forefront of CCS”.
The CO2CRC chief executive was more revealing. A tonne of CO2, he said, is “only worth as much as our ability to prove it. As CCS moves offshore and across borders, and stored carbon becomes a tradable credit, measuring storage is becoming as important as storage itself.”
That is exactly what the governments of Australia and Singapore are negotiating right now.
How we got here
On 13 November 2023, the Albanese government’s Sea Dumping amendments passed the Senate. In November 2024, Australia deposited a declaration allowing the transboundary trade of CO2 under the London Protocol.
One thing remained to be finalised: a treaty with the exporting country looking to dump their carbon pollution here in Australia.
Singapore is that country. The Green Economy Agreement commits both governments to a legally binding instrument to ship carbon dioxide from Singapore into Australia and dump it offshore permanently. Ministers have now agreed to finish negotiations by the end of the year, which is less than 8 weeks away.
Softening up the targets
The Perth conference is the next step in a long campaign by government and the fossil fuel industry to soften up regulation and legislation for the “Sequestration Nation” vision in Low Emissions Technology Australia’s 2025 report, which imagines Australia dumping up to 50 million tonnes of CO2 a year, including carbon from nations including Singapore, Japan and South Korea.
Resources Minister Madeleine King launched that report in parliament house and is actively backing it. Foreign Minister Penny Wong set the stage. As Leader of the government in the Senate, she pushed the Sea Dumping changes through in 2023, accusing the cross benches’ refusal to unquestioningly back these changes as saying no to Santos, Woodside and Inpex.
A gas deal in a offsets greenwashing
Australia supplies about 32 per cent of Singapore’s gas as LNG, while Singapore supplies about 25 per cent of Australia’s fuel, according to the two Prime Ministers. We ship gas to Singapore, Singapore burns it, maybe captures some of it, and the emissions come back to be dumped in Australia. The gas keeps flowing, and the carbon traders get to cook the books.
We need to be asking what other conversations are happening with the countries that buy our export gas, while the industry pays next to nothing in tax on it?
The fossil fuel and carbon trading interests are already urging Australia to strike similar treaties with Japan and South Korea.
Are they being offered the same deal: keep buying our gas, and send your carbon pollution here to be dumped in our oceans and regional areas, then greenwash it with dodgy carbon offsets as part of a global carbon trading scam?
Australians have a right to know before another treaty is signed, or the first ship of carbon pollution makes its way here.
The carbon dumping scam
The Australia Institute has long called CCS what it is: carbon dumping, and a scam that soaks up public money and lets the fossil fuel industry keep expanding.
Chevron’s Gorgon project missed its targets by about 50 per cent over its first five years, and analysis found its failure accounted for half of a national rise in emissions in a single year. Taxpayers put $1.3 billion into CCS between 2003 and 2017 with no large-scale operating project to show for it.
Dodgy offsets finish the job
Carbon dumping does not work or work alone. It comes as part of offsets bundles and that is how new fossil fuel projects get approved and large pollution countries can tout their net zero ambitions.
The carbon credits used as offsets do not reliably represent real, additional and permanent cuts, so the “net” emissions reported do not reflect reality. That is how the Hunter Valley Operations coal mine and Woodside’s Browse gas project are meant to get over the line. Approve the project, claim the credits/offsets boondoggle, call it net zero, and let real emissions keep rising.
The public gets the bill
Under the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Act, the company operating CCS sites stay responsible for at least 15 years after dumping stops. Then, once the minister is satisfied, long-term liability transfers to the Commonwealth, which must indemnify the former operator indefinitely, with no cap and no sunset clause.
Ongoing monitoring (including via seismic blasting in the ocean sites), leakage, remediation and compensation all become the problem of Australian taxpayers.
Now add a foreign polluter. If the CO2 Singapore dumps here leaks in 2060, who pays? Nobody is promoting that part of the deal being negotiated, and the treaty text is not public.
What should happen
The Albanese government should not sign this carbon dumping agreement. At an absolute minimum, it must release the draft text, rule out any public subsidies or indemnity for importing carbon pollution and dumping it, and make clear that no project underwritten by it can justify new or expanded fossil fuel approvals.
Singapore has a real emissions problem and so do we. The solution is to stop extracting and burning the stuff, not to ship the waste somewhere in the outback or the ocean, out of sight.
Phase out fossil fuels, end the subsidies, and stop treating Australia as either site for extraction site or pollution dumping ground.
That means ending false solutions like CCS and dodgy carbon offsets, as the scientists at Santa Marta urged when they called for halting new fossil fuel expansion.
It must be a key negotiating point at COP31, where Australia is President of Negotiations, and at the Second Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Tuvalu in 2027. Australia cannot sign a treaty to import carbon pollution and still claim to lead a Pacific-centred fossil fuel phase-out.
Louise Morris is the head of fossil fuel transition, at The Australia Institute
