A climate solution or distraction? The carbon capture facility at Chevron's Western Australian Gorgon project tells a cautionary tale

By Daniel Mercer*

Beside the turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean, on top of the red sand of Western Australia's arid north-west, relics of Australia's industrial past stand like museum pieces.

The derricks of oil wells bob up and down on Barrow Island, more than 1,200 kilometres north of Perth, much as they have done since the discovery of reserves in the 60s.

But look a little further, beyond the derricks, and another construction — of shiny steel pipes and machinery on an epic scale — looms much larger.

It is the Gorgon project — a gas plant owned by US energy giant Chevron of truly monumental size that is Australia's most expensive-ever resources development.

At this plant, more than 40,000 tonnes of gas is processed every day through a feat of modern engineering.

The gas is chilled to minus 162 degrees Celsius and compressed to a tiny fraction of its natural form — 1/600th — before being loaded onto specially designed ships that can hold and transport this liquefied natural gas, or LNG.

From there, the gas is sent to Australia's biggest trading partners in North Asia, where it is used to feed the energy-hungry economies of Japan, China and South Korea.

For all the attention the LNG plant demands from the observer, it is another, much more modest construction nearby that arguably attracts just as much, if not more, scrutiny.

Sitting amid the spinifex and low sandy dunes to the north of Barrow Island is the plant Chevron hopes can — and has long claimed will — prevent many of the emissions that would otherwise be caused by Gorgon.

It is the world's biggest carbon capture and storage, or CCS, project.

And, as the name suggests, it involves taking carbon from the Gorgon project and burying it deep underground to avoid releasing it into the atmosphere.

The part CCS might play in cutting greenhouse gas emissions is likely to get a fresh airing over the coming week, with global climate talks known as COP29 underway in Azerbaijan.

A series of setbacks

Earlier this year, Chevron gave a rare insight into the performance of a project that is a flag-bearer for the technology globally.

In theory, the plant is supposed to bury — or sequester — 80 per cent of the carbon dioxide from Gorgon's gas fields over the life of the project.

Chevron's commitment to bury the carbon formed part of Gorgon's environmental approval from the WA government.

But seemingly endless problems and delays with the CCS plant on Barrow Island have dashed those plans, at least in the short term.

Such have been the setbacks, Chevron estimates it has so far buried just over 10 million tonnes of CO2, or barely a third of what was promised by now.

Even still, Chevron's director of Australian operations, Danny Woodall, said the CCS plant was providing valuable lessons.

Crucially, he said most, if not all, of the problems on Barrow Island were technical in nature and could be fixed.

Once this happened, he said Gorgon would be able to deliver on its sequestration promises.

"These projects are complicated, complex," Mr Woodall said.

"They take time to develop. We're working hard to find ways to develop those projects across the world.

"And I think Gorgon is one example of where that's happening.

"The fact that we've injected (more than 10) million tonnes, we have plans to inject more and to increase that capacity, I think is a testament to it working."

Solution or distraction?

Across the world, there is renewed interest in carbon capture and storage.

Leading this interest has been the United States, where President Joe Biden turned on the money taps to turbocharge investment in the technology in America.

Under his signature Inflation Reduction Act, which aims to clean up America's economy, firms can get up to $US85 ($129) for every tonne of carbon they can store.

And companies including the Western world's biggest oil super-major ExxonMobil have rushed to take advantage of the scheme.

Stephanie Chiang, a research analyst at global energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, said the enthusiasm from oil and gas firms for CCS was understandable.

It was, she said, one of the most obvious ways for them to cut their emissions.

"I think CCS first and foremost is one of the key decarbonisation pathways," Ms Chiang said.

"It's not the only one of course but it is important to help a lot of economies to get to net zero."

But critics of the technology — and the fossil fuel industry's embrace of it — say it is a dangerous distraction.

Geoscientist Dimitri Lafleur, who used to work at Dutch-Anglo oil behemoth Shell, said carbon capture and storage did practically nothing to deal with the root cause of global warming — the combustion of fossil fuels.

If anything, he said it would only prolong their use and make it harder to rein in emissions in later years.

To illustrate his point, he cited Chevron's own numbers for Gorgon.

Mr Lafleur, now the chief scientist at the Australasian Centre for Corporation Responsibility, said Gorgon had in five years buried about 10 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

By comparison, he said the amount of carbon dioxide equivalent emitted courtesy of fossil fuel combustion every year was 40 billion tonnes.

In other words, the amount of carbon buried by Gorgon to date amounted to 1/4000th of global greenhouse gas emissions every year.

What's more, he said burying carbon naturally contained in oil and gas fields did nothing to prevent the release of vastly more carbon into the atmosphere when the resource was used by customers at the end of the line.

"It's very problematic," Mr Lafleur said.

"It's the wrong type of application of CCS, because you cannot sequester the emissions that are associated with combustion of fossil fuel, and that's a magnitude larger than the emissions that are emitted from the development of fossil fuels.

"So if you're trying to capture those emissions at one facility, you are still increasing emissions if you look at the whole life cycle."

The oil and gas industry, for its part, argues that fossil fuels are not the problem so much as the emissions they cause.

Chris Powers, vice-president at Chevron's New Energies division, said the aim, in that sense, should be the reduction or elimination of those emissions rather than the use of those fuels themselves.

To that end, Mr Powers said Chevron first looked to make its operations more efficient, avoiding waste and associated emissions where possible.

Beyond that, he said CCS would be a key plank in the company's efforts.

Faced with questions about the high cost of the technology at Gorgon — where the CCS plant is believed to have cost as much as $3.5 billion to date — he was sanguine.

"One of the things I say with any new technology, whether it's CCS, whether it's wind, solar … there's always a cost curve and a learning curve associated with it," Mr Powers said.

"Initial projects always cost more, and as you develop more and more projects over time, the unit cost of those projects are going to come down as you have learnings (sic)."

Ms Chiang said the jury was still out on whether — or the extent to which — carbon capture and storage could be brought down in cost to a level that made it viable.

And she acknowledged there was a world of difference between the hype around CCS and what it was currently delivering.

Despite this, Ms Chiang said the industry was still at a fledgling stage in its development and only starting to be taken more seriously.

Among its backers, she noted, were not just the usual industry types but the International Energy Agency, a club of rich energy-using nations that has also called for a halt to new fossil fuel developments.

She said it was better to have a viable CCS industry than not, arguing some industries as well as countries would find it hard to reach carbon neutrality without it.

"I don't see it as a distraction," Ms Chiang said.

"I think it's one of the solutions as part of your decarbonisation toolkit that a country has.

"And that's why CCS, I mean if you look across multiple net zero scenarios… is still part of that toolkit.

"Yes, CCS does help to decarbonise upstream oil and gas production, the use of fossil fuels, but at the same time it also decarbonises those hard-to-abate industrial sectors.

"And I think we shouldn't forget about that."

Carbon capture's role

Mr Lafleur from the ACCR agreed that the technology behind CCS was not the problem and, in fact, would be needed in the push to decarbonise.

He said it was common ground that some industries — such as cement making — would have to rely on CCS because they had few, if any, other ways to cut their emissions.

Similarly, he said it could be a useful way of clawing back reverses in the event the world blows past the limits set by the Paris climate accord, under which global temperature rises would be kept to no more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

But Mr Lafleur warned that the technology should not be used by incumbent oil and gas producers as a stalking horse for other motives.

"There are other avenues where it can be a part of the solution," Mr Lafleur said.

"And that's more to do with the industries that eventually, if we get close to net zero, are not able to reduce their emissions.

"The second portion here is that CCS can play a real role in the removal of carbon from the atmosphere.

"If you put CCS onto a fossil fuel project, you are delaying the transition, you continue to rely on fossil fuels and you are increasing emissions in the long term."

Daniel Mercer is a Western Australian journalist working for the ABC. The ABC paid for travel on a Chevron chartered plane to access Barrow Island. This article is here with permission. (c) ABC News 2024.