Chevron’s WA CCS Caper An Ongoing Cock-Up

Chevron Australia says it’s proud to have the world’s largest operational carbon capture and storage (CCS) system. What it shouldn’t be proud of is the results to date.

The project is located at Chevron’s Gorgon liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility on Barrow Island in Western Australia. Carbon dioxide is taken from offshore gas reservoirs and injected into a sandstone formation two kilometres under Barrow Island, where it will (hopefully) remain permanently trapped. The project is expected to operate for 40-plus years.

“Up to 4 million tonnes” of CO2 was to be stored each year. The agreement with the WA Government was Chevron would store 80% of the CO2 from the project, calculated on a five-year rolling average.

Since starting up in August 2019 and to July last year, the Gorgon carbon capture and storage system had only managed to inject approximately 5.5 million tonnes – failing to meet requirements. As part of making good on this, the company was to buy a bunch of offsets and sling a bundle of bucks at “lower carbon projects”.

Last Friday, Chevron Australia reported it had completed the acquisition and surrender of 5.23 million ” credible” greenhouse gas offsets – the nature of which weren’t mentioned¹. The company is still nutting out details of arrangements for investment in Western Australian “lower carbon” projects.

Chevron CCS Fail Continues

With another year under Chevron Australia’s belt,  how has the Gorgon CCS project been faring? Surely with the “start-up” challenges out of the way, things are really cranking.

This doesn’t appear to be the case. The company reports it has injected more than 6.6 million tonnes of CO2e since start-up in August 2019; just 1.1 million tonnes or so in the past year. This is far less than the first two years of operations.

“Due to the time required to allow for the safe start-up of the system, an additional shortfall will be reported for the five-year rolling average period ending 17 July 2022,” stated Chevron Australia.

The “safe start-up” excuse doesn’t really wash for this past year – injection should be going gangbusters by now.

So, the company will be shelling out more bucks for more offsets and whatever else. But perhaps that is working out to be cheaper?

Chevron “Taking The People Of WA For Fools”

Commenting on the project late last year, Executive Director of the Conservation Council of WA (CCWA) Maggie Woods said:

“Chevron has been operating this facility in breach of ministerial conditions for years – releasing enormous amounts of CO2 pollution and raking in billions of dollars in revenue … this is just another indication that CCS schemes do not work and are merely a smokescreen behind which big polluters can continue to expand and increase their highly damaging operations.”

A report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) released early this month  notes CCS technology has been used in various forms in some gas processing projects since the 1970s²; but:

“the inability to meet capture requirements on Project Gorgon casts doubt on the actual technology readiness.”

Carbon Capture Landscape 2022 states:

“As there are still many unknowns and risks with carbon capture technologies, global focus should remain on the least cost, low-hanging fruit to support the energy transition. In most contexts, this is in the form of renewable energy deployment, electrification and supporting grid modernisation investments to help move renewable energy to where and when it is needed.”