- Australia’s Queensland state will decide this month whether to give Glencore a key approval to bury liquefied carbon dioxide.
- The project is “unthinkable,” said Michael Guerin, whose AgForce farm association launched a court case in March to force the federal government to review Glencore’s plans.
Australia’s Queensland state will decide in May 2024 whether to give Glencore a key approval to bury liquefied carbon dioxide in the country’s largest aquifer. Farm groups say they will block this plan because it risks poisoning water supplies.
However, Swiss commodities giant Glencore plans a three-year, A$210 million ($135 million) pilot project to pump 330,000 metric tons of CO2 from a coal-fired power plant in the northeastern state into a 2.3 km (1.4 miles) underground aquifer. “This is an important test case for onshore CCS in Australia,” said Glencore spokesperson Francis De Rosa.
Alex Zapantis at the CCS Institute said using aquifers to store carbon is becoming more common. The porous rock of many aquifers can host huge amounts of liquefied CO2. But he said the regulators will choose and approve only those where the water is so deep and low quality that it is unsuitable for other uses.
Glencore says there is no demand for the low-quality, expensive-to-reach water in its pumping site and the CO2 is extremely unlikely to spread significantly from where it is put.
“Our project is based on very robust data, fieldwork and analysis,” De Rosa said, adding that several government agencies had reviewed the plan.
But farm groups say it risks poisoning part of the Great Artesian Basin, a network of groundwater deposits spanning much of eastern Australia that supports agriculture and communities. They say the acidic CO2 in the rock could release and spread toxic substances like lead and arsenic.
Also, speaking at a beef industry conference this month, Queensland’s premier, Steven Miles, said the project “doesn’t sound like a good idea to me” and was unlikely to satisfy the state’s environmental rules. This prompted Glencore to complain that Miles was interfering in the regulatory process.
Queensland’s environment department said the state’s independent environmental regulator had considered the potential impacts to groundwater and the Great Artesian Basin and was preparing its final assessment report.
Furthermore, Australia has only one active CCS project, the world’s largest, at Chevron’s Gorgon liquefied natural gas (LNG) project on an island off the northwest coast.
According to the Global CCS Institute, two more are under construction, including Santos’s first onshore operation to inject CO2 into a depleted gas field in South Australia, and 14 are in development. Most target offshore storage, and about half plan to store it in depleted oil or gas reservoirs.