On Monday, energy giant Chevron announced its inability to meet the previously set carbon capture and storage (CCS) targets of its project Gorgon for liquefied natural gas. The aim was for a minimum of 80% of the CO2 emissions from the reservoirs feeding the Gorgon LNG plant to be captured in the first 5 years of its operation.
However, the Gorgon project, located in Western Australia, has experienced a rough start with its carbon capture and storage site.
The multinational energy corporation confirmed that the project will only be able to sequester a fraction of the estimated CO2 emissions in its first 5 years.
The project had issues at the beginning that delayed its start from the first train that came online in 2016 all the way to 2019 when it officially started up. Since then, further problems have continued to act as a setback in the facility’s operation.
By design, project Gorgon should be able to capture 4 million tonnes of carbon emissions per year. Since the start of its operation in August 2019, however, the project has only managed to inject a total of 5 million tonnes of CO2, which amounts to roughly 30% of initial projections.
Chairperson of Sustainable Energy Now, WA, Ian Porter has commented on the situation with criticism towards Chevron.
“Chevron needs to face significant fines and be forced to offset the more than 6 million tonnes of unauthorized legacy carbon dioxide releases. Gorgon’s failure poses a major problem for any oil and gas company betting on CCS to meet net zero,” Porter said.
He also went on to characterize the use of CCS technology, in its current state, as “reckless disingenuous for the industry”.
