Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a technology that will be essential to achieving large-scale decarbonisation in Asia Pacific. We caught up with Dmitry Kosyak from our member company Woodside Energy to discuss the potential of CCS, including the opportunity for Australia to play a key role in supporting the broader APAC region to create an international offshore carbon storage industry.
1.    How did you come to be working in CCS?
I joined Woodside’s CCS team at its inception in 2020 to help assess the potential benefit of CCS and opportunities to develop CCS in Australia. One of those opportunities – the proposed Angel CCS Project – is a flagship large-scale multi-user CCS hub that is being progressed in Western Australia to provide an opportunity to support the decarbonisation of local hard-to-abate industry and support our trading partners on the same decarbonisation journey in APAC.
2.    What is it about CCS that fascinates/interests you the most?
CCS consists of a set of technological processes that are well established and well known from an engineering standpoint, however only very few stakeholders are familiar with the technology and the potential benefits it could deliver, such as:
- Reducing emissions for existing, hard-to-abate industries: This includes cement, iron and steel and the chemical sectors that emit carbon due to the nature of the industrial processes and requirements for the high-temperature heat.
- Generating lower carbon[1] power: Decarbonising existing and future power generation is crucial to achieve net zero emissions. CCS complements renewables, helping make the lower carbon[1] grid of the future resilient and reliable.
- Facilitating the development of new lower carbon industries at scale (such as the production of hydrogen and ammonia): Hydrogen could play a major role in the future where natural gas with CCS could be a lower cost way to produce lower carbon[1] hydrogen.
- Providing the foundation for technology-based carbon dioxide removal (CDR): This includes technologies such as direct air capture (DAC) which utilises chemicals to directly capture CO2 from the atmosphere and uses CCS technologies to permanently store it underground.
3.    Why is CCS so important for the APAC region?
CCS has a key role to play in meeting the world’s emissions reduction requirements. As noted in a 2022 report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), CCS is one of a suite of solutions that can help deliver net-zero and net-negative emissions.
We are seeing interest from the APAC region for large-scale, near-term decarbonisation solutions, which has been reinforced through the various policy settings of countries like Singapore and Japan.
Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore face the challenge of emissions reduction and will foreseeably look to near neighbour nations to support their efforts. CCS has the potential to provide a pathway for partners in the region to decarbonise their own industrial emissions.
Australia is uniquely positioned, with subsurface characteristics that are highly suitable for large-scale CCS projects, which could provide benefits for both decarbonisation and energy security in the APAC region. We also have well established regulations that give Australia an advantage to develop the CCS industry/services at pace that may help countries in APAC to meet their emissions reduction objectives.
By leveraging our track record of reliable operations and strong customer relationships, Woodside is investing in services such as CCS that can help customers reduce or avoid emissions. The Woodside-operated Angel CCS Project is looking at the feasibility of aggregating both domestic and international CO2 volumes which could help scale transport and storage solutions and reduce customer costs that may otherwise be prohibitive.
4.    What are the major building blocks that will allow CCS to reach its full potential in APAC?
Australia has an opportunity to play a key role in this emerging market, supporting the broader APAC region in creating an international offshore carbon storage industry.
To realise the full potential of CCS in the APAC region, collaboration is important. We don’t just need new sources of energy, we need entirely new technologies, infrastructure, products and supportive regulations. This is where collaboration is so important and why a key part of our strategy is to collaborate with potential customers, research organisations, governments and other stakeholders to unlock new supply chains.
State and Federal government will also play a key role in the scaling up of CCS. The Australian government is playing a critical role in reducing regulatory barriers that may prevent emissions reduction options domestically and in our trading partners jurisdictions, and support the efforts being undertaken to streamline regulatory frameworks.
Consideration should also be given to the support required for the creation of decarbonisation hubs to deploy CCS for hard-to-abate industries. This could allow reduced costs and timeframes for implementing CCS based on common-user infrastructure, support regional economic activity and job creation, and assist hard-to-abate sectors in transitioning to net zero. The oil and gas industry can play a key role in helping hard-to-abate sectors reduce emissions by providing technology and expertise in solutions like CCS. Due to the cross sectoral decarbonisation potential of CCS, government support of this technology would be a key enabler.
5.    What is one thing you would like people to better understand about CCS?
CCS is a mature technology which represents a proven solution to abate large-scale industrial emissions. It has a broader application than just oil and gas and could be instrumental for decarbonisation of certain hard-to-abate industries – where renewables are not efficient or cannot be used due to nature of the manufacturing process.
[1] Woodside uses this term to describe the characteristic of having lower levels of associated potential GHG emissions when compared to historical and/or current conventions or analogues, for example relating to an otherwise similar resource, process, production facility, product or service, or activity.
