Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has been successfully employed for decades and is already enabling significant emissions reduction in Asia Pacific.
Myth
CCS is unproven technology that is too expensive for Asia.
Fact
CCS is already being used successfully in the region and must be scaled up if local, regional and global climate goals are to be achieved.
CCS: a real technology that will decarbonise Asia
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) will provide at-scale decarbonisation that will be essential to Asia’s progress towards climate targets. Both the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have identified CCS as a technology that will be critical to the world achieving its net zero targets.
CCS is a proven technology that has been employed globally for decades. Large-scale projects are already operational in Asia Pacific and other parts of the world, with hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO2 stored over the past three decades.
CCS is already having an impact in APAC
Two projects in Australia demonstrate the ability of CCS to safely store emissions, driving significant decarbonisation.
The Moomba CCS project, operated by Santos in outback South Australia, has stored more than 2 million tonnes of CO2e since coming online in October 2024 and is one of the largest onshore CCS projects in the world. With a nameplate capacity of 1.7 million tonnes per annum, the emissions reduction capacity of Moomba is the equivalent of removing 700,000 petrol cars from the road each year.
While Moomba is currently capturing and sequestration emissions from its namesake gas plant, surrounding reservoirs have an estimated storage capacity of up to 20 million tonnes of CO2 per annum for 50 years, providing considerable storage opportunities for third parties.
Moomba’s storage cost of less than $US30 per tonne is evidence that large-scale, high-quality CCS can operate affordably.
On the other side of the country, on Western Australia’s Barrow Island, Chevron’s Gorgon CCS has now injected more than 12 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent since it started operating in 2019. Gorgon, which is projected to be the largest long-term CO2 storage project in the world, is expected to mitigate more than 100 million tonnes of emissions over the course of its lifetime.
The impact of CCS on a global scale
According to the Global CCS Institute’s 2025 Global Status of CCS report, there are 77 commercial projects currently operating worldwide with combined storage capacity of 64 million tonnes per year. An additional 70% of operational capacity will become operational in coming years.
In November 2025, London’s Imperial College published the first ever complete record of underground storage of CO2. Since 1996, more than 383 million tonnes of CO2 have been removed from atmosphere and stored underground through CCS – the same level of emissions that would be produced by 81,044,946 petrol-powered cars in a year.
The register includes Norway’s Sleipner project, the world’s first commercial CO2 storage project, which is now into its 30th year of operation and has stored more than 19 million tonnes of emissions. Soon it will include Northern Lights, the first project to deliver cross-border CO2 transport and storage as a service. Located off Norway, Northern Lights will not only sequester CO2 from Norwegian industry under the North Sea but also emissions from customers in the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden.
Advancing cross-border CCS in Asia
Supportive government policies and collaboration will be required for the development of similar cross-border CCS projects in Asia. This is because of the large distances between the biggest sources of emissions and the “sinks” that will store them.
Major economies such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore have the technical capability to capture emissions from industry but lack the geological capacity to store a significant portion of this CO2. Meanwhile countries such as Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia possess ample storage space and have signalled interest in providing CO2 storage services. A range of MOUs and collaboration agreements are already in place between emitting nations and prospective storage partners.
There is a pressing need in Asia Pacific for policy and regulatory environment to catch up to technology, with greater fluency and uniformity in the way different countries treat aspects of CO2 transactions. This is why the Asia Natural Gas and Energy Association has worked with stakeholders around the region to develop a framework that will inform government-to-government agreements on cross-border CCS.
In addition to sequestering up to three gigatonnes of CO2 by 2050, cross-border CCS will create economic opportunities for emitting and storing nations. Boston Consulting Group projects that CCS in Asia Pacific could support as many as 300,000 jobs and add up to $US220 billion in GDP annually as soon as 2035.
