The federal government has given major project status to a carbon capture and storage (CCS) project in Darwin, saying it will provide jobs and support industry in the Top End.
The Bonaparte CCS project is owned by Inpex, Woodside and TotalEnergies, which want to store captured carbon dioxide under the seabed on a site about 250km offshore from Darwin from 2030.
Science and industry minister Tim Ayres awarded major project status to the CCS project and the Northern Silica project, and extended the status to Mike Cannon-Brookes’ Sun Cable project and the Broken Hill cobalt blue project, as part of the federal government’s effort to modernise the country’s energy system.
“Backing in renewable energy projects strengthens and diversifies the local supply chain while directly creating regional job opportunities and attracting further investment,” he said in a statement.
“Granting Major Project Status to these initiatives marks a pivotal step in driving structural economic transformation and regional reindustrialisation, a crucial part of the Albanese Government’s Future Made in Australia strategy.”
Major project status is given to complex developments that will cost more than $50 million to build, but are considered vital for national interests.
The other development to receive major project status today was Diatreme Resources’ $535 million Northern Silica project, which is still putting together an environmental impact statement for Queensland planning approval.
Diatreme says the project will produce three to five million tonnes of silica sand for 25 years for domestic solar panels, silicon wafers and high-end electronics manufacturing.
High quality silica sand with a purity of effectively 100ppm silica is the minimum requirement for solar panel manufacturing.
Sun Cable, officially known as the Australia-Asia Power Link, is now defined as a 6GW solar energy project, based in Darwin, that will be available for both domestic and international markets.
Broken Hill Cobalt Blue is aiming to produce battery grade cobalt chemicals and become the first domestic producer of elemental sulphur. Its goal is to provide enough product to make batteries for around 375,000 electric vehicles per year.
“Dangerous error”
The Bonaparte CCS is intended to reduce emissions from Inpex’s extremely polluting Ichthys LNG facility in Darwin, which is why one industry person took issue with its inclusion as a “renewable energy venture” in Ayres’ press release.
Clean Energy Finance director Tim Buckley called its inclusion as such “a seriously dangerous error” given it’s not in fact a renewable energy project.
“There is zero connection to “renewable energy” in the proposed Bonaparte Carbon Capture and Storage Project, located offshore northwest of Darwin. To suggest this implies your team is spending way too much time talking to fossil fuel firms and their PR spin-teams,” Buckley wrote on LinkedIn.
“It is critical that the PM Anthony Albanese’s #FMIA [Future Made In Australia] campaign stay on target and not be used as an excuse for greenwashing the Australian-based majority foreign owned fossil fuel industry.”
The terminology was labelled greenwashing by Environment Centre NT’s Bree Ahrens, who said the federal government “has no business” helping fossil fuel companies expand gas production in the Northern Territory by calling it clean.
“Carbon capture and storage remains an unproven technology at scale, and marketing it as ‘renewable energy’ is misleading and offensive to Australians who are bearing the brunt of worsening climate change,” she said in a statement.
“There’s nothing renewable about carbon capture and storage – it’s a fossil fuel industry’s excuse to keep extracting coal and gas while pretending to care about climate change.”
CCS fantasies
It’s a project that is increasingly urgent as the safeguard mechanism now forces Inpex to both reduce those emissions and pay for those above its cap, an issue CEO Takayuki Ueda complained about in 2023.
“Following the enhancement of regulations by the Australian government, Ichthys would also be required to cut 4.9% of CO2 [emissions] every year as determined by law,” Ueda told a press conference in Tokyo at the time.
“However, CCS cannot be introduced today, or tomorrow, regardless of our efforts to have it introduced as quickly as possible.”
In the 12 months to 30 June 2024, Inpex emitted 6.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, according to corporate emissions data held by the Clean Energy Regulator (CER).
This is just under its baseline emissions cap of 7.5 million tonnes – which is higher than the 6.95 million tonne cap it was allowed in 2021.
However, despite government and corporate dreams of finding a CCS project that works, to date the technology has proved itself to be a white elephant.
By the end of 2024, the country’s flagship CCS project at Chevron’s Gorgon gas field offshore from Western Australia was capturing less carbon dioxide (CO2) than ever.
The Gorgon gas field approved on condition the CCS project could and would capture 80 per cent of the CO2 emitted, or 4 million tonnes a year.
What it achieved in fiscal 2024 was just 1.6 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent.
The cost of the failed technology in carbon credits and ongoing maintenance and problems with the injection reservoir was $3.2 billion in 2023.
That works out to about $200 a tonne of CO2 captured, versus the $70 Chevron initially thought it would cost, according to calculations by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).
That is a price Woodside chief Meg O’Neill recently inferred was too expensive for oil and gas companies to bother with.
The technology’s track record is sketchy at best.
In 2023, IEEFA found only two success stories from 13 CCS projects it reviewed around the world.
But those projects, Sleipner, which has been running since 1996, and Snøhvit, running since 2008 in Norway, have their own problems which were only solved because of the country’s high carbon emissions tax.
- * This article has been updated with comments from Tim Buckley and Bree Ahrens.
