Woodside, Yara collaborate to study feasibility of CCS in Western Australia

Woodside Energy and Yara Pilbara Fertilisers will collaborate for a feasibility study of Carbon Capture and Storage in Western Australia to help decarbonize the fertilizer firm's operations, Woodside said April 5.

Woodside's Angel CCS Joint Venture is a proposed large-scale, multi-user CCS hub near Karratha with up to 5 million mt/year of carbon dioxide storage capacity that could be used by Australian and international industries.

"A multi-user CCS hub near Karratha would be ideally located to aggregate emissions from various existing industrial emissions sources across the Pilbara," Woodside Vice President, Carbon Solutions Jayne Baird said. The project would be "providing users with advantaged access to a local, low-cost and large-scale emissions abatement solution."

The initial size of the proposed CCS facility, where Chevron is a joint venture partner, is subject to the completion of additional technical, regulatory and commercial studies, Woodside said.

The Joint Venture is exploring the potential for the CCS hub to service international customers, which could help reduce the emissions of Australia's key trading partners, while also creating a new export opportunity for Australia, it added.

At an investors' briefing on Woodside's Climate Transition Action Plan and 2023 Progress Report March 12, CEO Meg O'Neill said Woodside's most mature operated carbon capture and storage opportunity is Angel CCS.

Angel CCS is in pre-Front End Engineering and Design (FEED) stage and won't enter FEED until there's better customer certainty around CO2 storage, Shaun Gregory, executive vice president at Woodside said at the investors' briefing.

The goal is to complete the engineering design study, and to enter FEED and secure customers' demand, sufficient enough to provide confidence that it will get to the planned capacity, Gregory added.

In 2021, Woodside, with a target to hit net zero by 2050, set a $5 billion investment target by 2030 for new energy products such as hydrogen and ammonia and lower carbon services, such as CCS, of which it has spent $335 million, O'Neill said.

In addition to Angel CCS, Woodside has the Bonaparte CCS in Northern Territory and the South East Australia CCS off the coast of Victoria.

Western Australia introduced the Petroleum Legislation Amendment Bill 2023 and the Petroleum and Geothermal Energy Safety Levies Amendment Bill 2023 on Nov. 29, 2023 to enable the transport and storage of greenhouse gases, among others, to help the state's 2050 net-zero emissions target within its Climate Policy and Greenhouse Gas Emissions Policy.

Platts, part of S&P Global Commodity Insights, assessed the technology-based carbon removal price at $126/mtCO2e April 4, up 0.8% month on month.