A sustainable future will require carbon capture and storage (CCS), and Australia’s existing infrastructure – including its plants, facilities and significant gas production as a leading global LNG exporter – offer the opportunity to make the most of this technology.
VP, ABB Energy Industries, Australia, Aaron Trueman spoke with two of ABB's APAC-based CCS experts about local applications for the technology including decarbonising hard-to-abate industries, current barriers to rapid implementation and ways to apply existing expertise to solve new challenges.
What you need to know:
- Augmenting renewables: Hard-to-abate industries including gas production, steel and cement, still require complementary measures beyond renewable energy to achieve decarbonization, with CCS as a leading solution.
- Reducing emissions: CCS captures emissions from industrial sources and stores them underground, preventing CO₂ from entering the atmosphere.
- Barriers to faster impact: The Asia-Pacific region is seeing a rise in CCS development, but regulatory and legislative barriers often slow final investment decisions.
- Solutions: ABB’s expertise across oil and gas infrastructure, and proven know-how in automation and electrification have informed the development of ABB CCS 360. Simulating scenarios at every stage of the captured carbon dioxide’s journey, ABB CCS 360 enables operators to manage both risk and cost.
No single approach has shaped the world’s approach to achieving net-zero carbon emissions. While hydrocarbons remain a significant part of today’s energy landscape, we are also witnessing strong efforts from industries and governments to diversify their energy mix and accelerate the shift towards renewable sources.
And while uptake of renewables over the past 20 years has moderately reduced Australia’s reliance on fossil fuels somewhat, the country is still likely to rely on such energy resources in the coming decades – challenging the goal to achieve net zero by 2050. [1]
Adding to this challenge, important sectors of the economy are proving particularly hard to abate. For example, Australia is the seventh-largest producer and second-largest exporter of natural gas – extraction of the significant gas resources in basins across the country, transportation (including the construction of proposed pipelines) and processing produces significant carbon. Geoscience Australia projects that, based on 2022 production levels, Australia’s identified reserves have the ability to support gas production over another 17 years. [2]
In this case, as well as other hard-to-abate industries, reducing emissions alone is not sufficient. That’s why businesses in Australia and around the world are looking at additional measures to reduce their impact.
Stopping it at the source
One of these measures is carbon capture and storage, or CCS.
“Carbon capture is one of the most viable and scalable near-term options to decarbonize hard-to-abate industries like steel or cement production,” said Daniel Tay, Regional Business Development Lead for CCS and New Energies, Asia Pacific, ABB.
CCS complements the shift to renewables by sequestering emissions, typically from large industrial facilities or power plants in underground geological formations, like depleted oil and gas reservoirs or saltwater aquifers. This stops carbon from entering the Earth’s atmosphere and contributing to global warming.
According to research from energy company Rystad, by the end of 2023, the world had 101 commercial CCS projects, with growth strongest in the Asia-Pacific region, which had previously lagged Europe and North America. [3]
“We're seeing CCS as a growing trend in the Asia Pacific, not as a silver bullet to decarbonize, but more as a complementary technology for transitioning to renewable-focused energy,” Daniel said.
In Australia, the local CCS surge has been mainly driven by liquified natural gas (LNG) projects. New gas developments increasingly require a CCS component to meet environmental and regulatory approvals, reflecting a growing awareness of the need to integrate carbon abatement measures early in project design.
“We're seeing a trend for new gas production projects where, to meet environmental requirements and other regulatory requirements, producers need to adopt a CCS component to their projects to get them through the environmental phase,” said David Noble, ABB Senior Account Manager, Process Automation, Australia.
Australia’s Federal Government incentives have promoted research and development, as well as implementation through project support:
The Carbon Capture Technologies Program (CCTP) funded seven projects in 2024 with a total funding pool of $65 million, focused on research, development and demonstration of novel capture and utilization technologies and methods, as well as addressing the decarbonization of hard-to-abate industries. [4]
The Safeguard Mechanism limits the emissions of industrial facilities that emit more than 100,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent per year, gradually reducing facilities’ limits over time. Facilities with emissions below their limits can earn carbon credits to bank or sell – meaning that facilities that use CCS projects to effectively reduce emissions could benefit.
At the state level, significant milestones have been achieved. An important CCS project in South Australia became fully operational in October 2024, providing large-scale geological storage. In Victoria, the Otway International Test Centre offers a sandbox for both industry and academia, with performance insights to inform commercial projects. Between 2008 and 2020, 95,000 tonnes of CO2 were stored and is now being monitored to aid cost reduction. [5]
The right thing to do
For Australia’s resources sector, the push towards CCS is driven by both social responsibility and regulatory necessity. Projects without a clear carbon abatement strategy risk failing to obtain necessary approvals.
However, the broader Asia-Pacific region still faces regulatory challenges. Although many CCS projects are announced, moving them through to final investment decision (FID) stage remains difficult in the absence of robust regulations and clear regulatory frameworks. Strengthening these frameworks will be critical to sustaining project momentum and scaling CCS deployment across the region.
“Energy demands will require continued gas production, as it will be a key part of the energy mix until greener sources can come online,” Noble said.
That ongoing reliance on gas during the energy transition underscores the increasing relevance of CCS projects.
“It's globally recognized that this is the way forward from a social responsibility and sustainability perspective,” Noble said.
Using existing expertise
Although CCS is still in a growth stage as a carbon abatement strategy, the technology has existed since the 1970s. The resource industry has long used it for enhanced oil or gas production, which involves injecting pressurized carbon dioxide into a field to increase the yield from the subsurface.
With CCS’s shift to permanent storage, however, Australia’s resource industry can draw on its existing assets and skillset to make the most of the opportunities presented by the technology.
“To do CCS at a mass scale — which is what people want to invest in — they're looking at using depleted oil and gas fields with known integrity and very well-known geology that can be easily evaluated,” Noble said.
“You can utilize infrastructure that would normally be decommissioned — and that's a nice one, because decommissioning costs in offshore oil and gas is monstrous. If this infrastructure can be put to more productive use and generate value, it presents a more sustainable business opportunity.”
Australian businesses have the opportunity to draw lessons from overseas. ABB hascontributed to Norwegian CCS project Northern Lights, which is helping to accelerate industrial decarbonization.
“Norway has been leading the way in the field of CCS and has been one of the early adopters of CCS to mitigate climate change,” Daniel said.
“ABB has been contributing expertise through end-to-end automation, electrification and safety solutions as well as remote operations for the Northern Lights project, which will be the world’s first open CO2 transport and storage infrastructure.”
A 360-degree view of CCS
The engineering expertise ABB provides in these situations is well developed and applicable to a broad range of projects. ABB CCS 360 is one solution that helps businesses transform towards more sustainable energy use.
CCS 360 simulates scenarios at every stage of the captured carbon dioxide’s journey from surface to underground – whether to subsea or land aquifers – reducing risk and saving costs by allowing operators to test options in a virtual setting.
“CCS 360 is specifically focused on derisking hub-and-cluster type CCS networks,” Daniel said.
“That’s where network operators and end users look to decarbonize an area of multiple emitters, taking multiple sources of CO2 that come into a common transportation network and are then injected into a field in the subsurface.
“A hub-and-cluster type network poses significant challenges; as you have multiple sources of CO2, you will in turn have varying pressures, temperatures and flowrates in the network. In addition, there will also be different impurities within the CO2 flow stream coming from different sources of industrial emitters, which have to be properly managed in real time to ensure reliability and availability of the CCS network operations.”
[1] Australian Energy Council, Carbon Capture Storage – A viable option for Australia’s future? https://www.energycouncil.com.au/analysis/carbon-capture-storage-a-viable-option-for-australia-s-future/
[2] Geoscience Australia, Australia's Energy Commodity Resources 2024 https://www.ga.gov.au/aecr2024/gas
[3] Rystad Energy, Energy Transition Report: Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) Market Update https://www.rystadenergy.com/insights/energy-transition-ccus-market-update-whitepaper
[4] DCCEEW, Carbon Capture Technologies Program grant recipients announced https://www.dcceew.gov.au/about/news/carbon-capture-technologies-program-grant-recipients-announced
[5] CO2CRC, CO2 storage validation https://co2crc.com.au/research/otway-international-test-centre/
