BP deal boosts Santos’ CCS ambitions

Santos’ Moomba project will not suffer from the high abatement costs that are the largest obstacle to CCS adoption

Santos’ plans to develop one of the world’s largest and cheapest carbon capture and storage (CCS) sites were boosted on 4 March when BP provisionally agreed to invest in the Australian independent gas producer’s first venture into CCS. The agreement commits the UK major to investing A$20mn ($13mn) in Santos’ CCS project at its Moomba plant in northern South Australia, subject to a successful FID by the end of 2020. The project, which took Feed last year and targets 1.7mn t/yr of CO2 capture, is located within the Cooper basin, a 130,000km² Permian-Triassic sedimentary basin that Santos says will eventually have a reinjection capacity of 20mn t/yr for 50 years. Moomba would benefit from low a