Australia issues recognition for offshore Northern Territory CCS project
The Australian government has awarded the planned Bonaparte Carbon Capture and Storage development Major Project Status.
INPEX Browse E&P heads the Bonaparte CCS Assessment joint venture, the other partners being TotalEnergies CCS Australia and Woodside Energy. It is the first offshore CCS scheme to achieve this designation from the government, INPEX added.
Minister for Industry and Innovation, Senator Tim Ayres, said the award was a recognition of the project’s potential to support a lower carbon future and to help the country attain its net zero ambitions.
Appraisal studies in 2024, INPEX added, confirmed a good-quality saline aquifer reservoir suitable for safe and permanent storage of carbon-dioxide in the Bonaparte basin, 250 km offshore Darwin in the Northern Territory.
INPEX believes it could become one of the world’s largest CCS projects in the world, decarbonizing not just local industries in northern Australia but others in the Asia-Pacific region.
The Joint Venture started preliminary FEED work in April and plans to start CO2 injection around 2030. Detailed analysis also continues of the reservoir appraisal data, to support a Declaration of Identified GHG Storage Formation application ahead of securing a greenhouse gas injection license.
INPEX acquired its 53% operated interest in the G-7-AP (Bonaparte) greenhouse gas assessment block in 2022. The company’s Ichthys LNG development could supply some of the emitted CO2 for subsurface storage.