Page 14 - AsianOil Week 20 2022

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Gorgon CCS project still

operating at half-capacity

ENERGY THE carbon capture and storage (CCS) project do that and get to the point to meeting the com-
TRANSITION serving the Chevron-led Gorgon LNG terminal mitments that you’ve got.”
in Australia continues to fall short of its perfor- Judd insisted, however, that the CO2 injection
mance targets. systems at the facility were working reliably and
This week, Chevron Australia’s director of that it was only a matter of scaling operations.
operations, Kory Judd, told Reuters that the CCS Chevron and its partners are required to cap-
project was operating at only half of its designed ture a minimum of 80% of the emissions from
capacity and that the company did not have a Gorgon LNG as a condition of the project’s
timeframe for when it would be able to meet its approval. Last year, Chevron bought carbon
carbon capture targets. The project was designed credits as compensation for falling short of the
Capturing at least 80% to capture and sequester 4mn tonnes per year of capture target.
of emissions was one carbon dioxide (CO2), but only managed 2.1mn Judd’s comments come shortly after the Insti-
of the conditions for tpy in 2021. It had previously been slated to reach tute for Energy Economics and Financial Anal-
Gorgon LNG’s approval. full capacity last year. ysis (IEEFA) flagged up the underperformance
“We’ve still got a way to go to meet the com- of the Gorgon CCS project in a new report. The
mitment to what we have the injection system institute warned that despite the relative matu-
designed for,” Judd told Reuters in an interview rity of CCS, it “has proved an unreliable technol-
ahead of the Australian Petroleum Production ogy in several cases”.
and Exploration Conference. “What we’re doing The majority of CCS projects globally have
is trying to learn our way through how you inject had “unique engineering challenges” that have
CO2 into the reservoirs, how do they respond, led to underperformance and cost blow-outs, the
then how do you do that reliably and how do you IEEFA added.™

Study shows Australian gas producers paid

no tax on AUD138bn combined profits

PROJECTS & A new study released by the Australian Insti- recent year for which data is available) on
COMPANIES tute this week shows that five major gas com- AUD110bn [$77.5bn] of income (approx. 1.5%).”
panies paid no income tax on combined profits The statement said that the industry and the
of AUD138bn ($97.2bn) over the last seven APPEA had claimed that gas projects would be
years. The companies – four of which are for- contributing billions of dollars in federal taxes,
eign-owned – operate in Australia and are mem- but that this has yet to happen.
bers of the Australian Petroleum Production and “It is unbelievable that you can make
Exploration Association (APPEA). AUD138bn and pay nothing in tax,” the author
The Australian Institute analysed data of the report and principal advisor to the Insti-
obtained from the Australian Taxation Office tute, Mark Ogge, told the Australian media. “Our
about Arrow Energy, Australia-Pacific LNG governments should not be letting this happen
(APLNG), Chevron, ExxonMobil and Senex, and and we need an overhaul of how the oil and gas
found that the companies had paid no income tax industry is taxed in Australia.”
to the Australian government for seven years. It Ogge said the gas companies had promised
also discovered that another company, Santos, the projects would produce billions for govern-
had paid only AUD6mn ($4.23mn) in tax from ment coffers, but Australia has received little
AUD28.9bn ($20.4bn) of income and paid no monetary gain and “a whole lot more climate
income tax from 2015 to 2018 and in 2020. impacts.” He called for greater scrutiny to be
A statement released by the Institute on May 17 given to the close ties between political repre-
said “none of the companies that own and operate sentatives and the oil and gas companies.
Queensland’s coal-seam gas (CSG) liquefied nat- However, the acting chief executive of
ural gas (LNG) projects have paid any income tax APPEA, Damian Dwyer, expressed his disagree-
on income earned on those projects to date.” ment with the Institute’s report, saying it misrep-
“Overall,” the statement continued, “the oil resents the contributions made by the industry
and gas industry in Australia paid AUD1.7bn and does not reflect the way the Australian tax
[$1.2bn] of income tax in 2018-19 (the most system works.™

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