That is an interesting and quite significant event for the industry imo.
It was no secret within the industry that Gorgon was struggling with CCS. They have had problems from the getgo with that.
There are several projects around the world hanging their hat on CCS. In particular, the brown coal to hydrogen project in Latrobe Valley, Victoria that relies entirely on CCS. Something that is very important to Japan's emission reduction program.
https://www.hydrocarbons-technology.com/news/kawasaki-hydrogen-production-brown-coal/The developers of that project had used the Gorgon project as an example when queried previously. There are no other CCS projects in the world of any kind of scale that have been successful as far as I can tell.
That's not to say that CCS won't work somewhere in the future. There are certain aspects of the Gorgon project that have contributed to it's poor performance that may not occur in other places. However, it's not looking good for CCS at the moment. It might be quite a tipping point actually.
I don't have a problem with tax payer money going into these projects. The technology needs to be explored and that costs money. When we look back in the future, we will be very glad that we spent money investigating these technologies. The amount spent will seem minimal in the scheme of things.
So, the next time you hear a politician casually refer to CCS as part of the solution, such as Keith Pitt did on Q and A only a couple of months ago, remember the failure of Gorgon.
In the meantime, wind and solar continue to be proven, successful, reliable technologies that are improving year on year. With a bit of luck, hydrogen from renewables will follow the same trajectory and we won't have to worry about CCS at all. Thus saving all those valuable hydrocarbons for better uses in the future.
