Australia designates offshore site for proposed Inpex carbon storage

Conservation group warns construction will be a major disturbance to ecosystems

Australia has designated an offshore seabed site near its northern coast where Japanese energy company Inpex plans to store carbon dioxide. The project would start in Darwin, the Northern Territory capital on the Timor Sea, and extend 260 kilometers (162 miles) offshore. Inpex would inject the CO2 into a deep saline aquifer called West Peron. The company is conducting environmental impact assessments and must obtain other government licenses before a final decision is made and injection starts.

Australian Resources Minister Madeleine King called the designation an important step and said it demonstrated the government’s support for technologies that help reduce emissions. “Carbon capture and storage will play an important role in reducing emissions from hard-to-abate industries, supporting Australia’s transition to net zero,” King said in a statement.

Inpex says the site can permanently store up to 443 million metric tons (488 million tons) of CO2 over 35 years. The primary customer would be the nearby Ichthys liquefied natural gas facility, which is majority-owned by Inpex and exports a majority of its gas to Japan. Inpex said other companies could store CO2 at the site in the future.

Environmental groups are concerned about effects on marine, coastal and terrestrial ecosystems. The area overlaps habitats for multiple threatened and migratory species, including dugongs, turtles and seabirds. Australian Marine Conservation Society campaigner Chelsea Deng said construction would be a major disturbance to these ecosystems. “A lot of it involves dredging, drilling, piling into the ocean,” she said. “It causes sediment disturbance. It causes water quality pollution through the chemical discharge. There’s a lot of underwater noise as part of it.”

Deng said the project would bring more marine traffic once operating, causing further disruptions, while routine underwater surveys to check for leaks would further harm the ecosystem. She also said monitoring of CO2 plumes would continue for decades. “This is really impactful and harmful to whales particularly, but it can negatively impact anything from plankton which have been shown to die up to 1.2 kilometers (3/4 miles) away from these seismic impulses,” she said.

Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is a three-step process that captures, transports and stores CO2, which contributes to climate change when released into the atmosphere. The technology has divided climate scientists, and the site’s approval has become part of a global debate over the strategy. Some governments and fossil-fuel giants, including Exxon Mobil and Shell, promote the strategy as a climate solution that buys time for countries and industries to transition to cleaner energy. The International Energy Agency considers carbon capture, utilization and storage a tool for curbing climate change, but the agency’s net-zero emissions scenario forecasts it will contribute less than 5% of emission reductions by 2050.

Detractors say the strategy will slow progress on already off-track global emissions efforts and allow power plants and industrial facilities to keep burning fossil fuels under the promise of capturing the exhaust later. CCS projects are moving ahead: the United States has several in operation, and the European Union’s first offshore facility opened in September.

The Associated Press described Japan as one of the world’s top polluters. The country has set goals to reduce carbon emissions by 60% by 2035 from 2013 levels and by 73% by 2040. Steel and cement production, oil refining and shipping are vital to the country’s economy, and fossil fuels generate a vast majority of its energy. The government has said CCS is indispensable to bridge the gap. “It enables decarbonization in areas where transitioning to non-fossil fuel alternatives — such as electrification or the use of hydrogen — is challenging. Consequently, CCS has become indispensable for simultaneously achieving a stable energy supply, economic growth, and decarbonization,” a 2025 briefing by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, said.

Japanese companies are pursuing additional CCS projects. Off the coast of Chiba, where surfing made its Olympic debut during the Tokyo Games, a large platform juts from the water as exploratory drilling takes place for the Tokyo Metropolitan Area CCS project, a joint effort involving Inpex, Nippon Steel and others to capture CO2 from steel plants and store it offshore. Another Japanese company is also planning to ship emissions to Malaysia.

Environmentalists say the ramping up of CCS will prolong the use of heavily polluting fossil fuels. “We see it as a greenwashing tactic that fossil fuel companies are using to green light continued pollution instead of doing the obvious choice of ramping down production and phasing out fossil fuels,” Deng said. Inpex did not respond to an email from The Associated Press. King and Australia’s Department of Industry, Science and Resources also did not respond to an email from AP seeking further comment, and Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry did not respond to a similar request. The project remains subject to environmental assessments, other government licenses and a final decision before CO2 injection starts.