CCM for Resources Companies

Our vision for CCM allows for a mix of carbon efficient, carbon neutral and carbon negative technologies to be applied and integrated into existing and future greenfield industrial sites to create value added products, while significantly reducing waste carbon emissions and ongoing storage liabilities. Broadly similar technologies are used to capture carbon, whether from the air or a waste stream, and CO₂ captured from a post-combustion stream and coupled with the right carbon manufacture technology, can provide a quick and very substantial win for resources companies. However, the most concentrated and accessible CO₂ in carbon capture source streams is from oil and gas production. This is mainly due to the high concentrations of CO₂ and the need to separate it from the produced gas for pipelining, transportation, liquefaction and compression.

And, in the process, they will solve the challenge of managing waste CO₂ for major resource companies. For example, in combination with air to fuels technology , refineries, LNG plants and other industrial facilities could turn CO₂ waste that is expensive to manage into valuable particulate-free premium fuels, which could displace conventional fossil fuels. Similarly, for resource companies looking beyond fuels there is an opportunity to turn CO₂ waste into valuable commodities such as graphene or carbon-based building materials, which lock the carbon up for good and provide a profitable and permanent solution to excess carbon. These technologies have market disruptive potential both locally in Australia and throughout the global marketplace.

The Challenge

According to the IEA's 2019 report - Tranforming Industry through CCUS - “The most cost-effective decarbonisation pathways will involve multiple strategies and will vary by sector and region.” A number of potential CCM solutions are emerging from organisations such as CSIRO, Carbon Engineering, Climeworks, Greyrock, Global Thermostat and the EU Graphene Flagship Project across a number of verticals. However, their differing technical approaches affect the requirements for key inputs such as power and water and the relative capital and operational costs. It is also likely, as the IEA suggests, that CCM hubs will form circular economies involving integrated sets of technologies, where the waste output for one becomes the feed for another. It is also likely that different solutions will be better suited for different locations and different industries. Determining which solutions should be selected for any one location is the challenge.