Captured carbon can’t be stored, not even for fossil-fuel giants

While carbon capture and storage is a scam that has already taken billions of taxpayer dollars and is now taking hundreds of millions of dollars more, the bigger problem is that the idea of a relatively straightforward transition to net zero is based on CCS working. And it doesn’t.

A new analysis by West Australian journalist and former oil and gas engineer Peter Milne has exposed just how poorly Chevron’s Gorgon LNG project on Barrow Island off the WA coast has performed at its intended goal of sequestering millions of tonnes of CO₂ in underground storage.

Gorgon is the world’s flagship CCS project, after the CCS component of the $7.5 billion Kemper power plant in Mississippi was shut after years of failure and delays in 2017. And it has been a massive failure. The Barrow Island facility is supposed to extract CO₂ from gas sourced from the Gorgon offshore field — which is required anyway for processing into LNG — and pump it into a reservoir two kilometres underground, after water has been pumped out of the reservoir to make way for it.