Anthony Western of Santos gave the SA/NT Branch a very interesting and informative talk on
“Moomba CCS – delivering a world leading CO 2 storage project”.
The Moomba Carbon Capture and Storage project is a large-scale CCS project at the Moomba
Gas Plant in the Cooper Basin, South Australia. New facilities were constructed to capture,
dehydrate, transport and permanently store CO 2 emissions that were previously vented to
atmosphere, and depleted gas fields were selected as the initial storage reservoirs. Five new
injection wells were drilled, and existing wells were re-purposed as monitoring wells to enable the
Monitoring and Verification (M&V) plan including environmental assurance monitoring.
Anthony’s talk reviewed the scope of the Moomba CCS project with a focus on the subsurface
scope. The project commenced operations in September 2024 and by June 2025 had safely
captured and permanently stored more than 1.0 million tonnes of CO 2 emissions. The wells and
storage reservoir are performing as expected and monitoring wells are seeing signs of CO 2
injection in line with reservoir model predictions. At 1.7 Mtpa CO 2 e, it is one of the largest CCS
projects in the world and its successful startup and early performance has enabled future CCS
growth in the Cooper Basin.
