Carbon capture and storage in Australia

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is an approach to mitigate global warming by capturing carbon dioxide CO₂ from large point sources such as fossil fuel power plants and storing it instead of releasing it into the atmosphere. Carbon capture and storage is also used to sequester CO₂ filtered out of natural gas from certain from natural gas fields. While typically the CO₂ has no value after being stored, Enhanced Oil Recovery uses CO₂ to increase yield from declining oil fields.

There are no currently-operating large-scale CCS projects in Australia, although the Gorgon gas project will qualify when it is fully operational. Despite multiple CCS demonstration projects at Australian coal-fired power stations, none of Australia's coal plants are currently capturing CO₂ or have a time frame for doing so. Australian Treasury modelling finds that CCS is not expected to be commercially viable until the 2030s. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that the economic potential of CCS could be between 10% and 55% of the total carbon mitigation effort until 2100.

In the 2017 budget, the Turnbull Government announced the cessation of the Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund in the 2017 financial year and the cessation of business case funding for the Carbon Capture and Storage Flagships program in financial year 2019. This is on top of the 2015 budget, where the Abbott Government cut $460m from CCS research projects leaving $191.7m to continue existing projects for the next seven years. The program had already been cut by the previous Labor government and much of the funding remained unallocated.

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