Costs of CO₂ Transport and Injection in Australia

This paper reports estimates of the costs of CO₂ transport and storage across Australia. The estimates were commissioned as part of the work of the Australian Government's Carbon Storage Taskforce. Using data provided by government departments and industry, we investigated combinations of nine emission hubs and twelve storage basins. We also developed a first-pass method for estimating numbers of injection wells using numerical reservoir simulation and comparisons with actual CO₂ injection projects.

This work forms part of a suite of studies intended to help formulate government policy on carbon capture and storage. Our analyses are aimed at helping industry and government to plan carbon abatement strategies by indicating regions likely to have lower deployment costs for CO₂ transport and injection.

We present engineering and economics results for projects across Australia and rank storage basins by cost. The cheapest cases store CO₂ from the Latrobe Valley in the Gippsland Basin (A$7 per tonne of CO₂ avoided), from Southern Queensland in the Surat Basin (A$ 12 per tonne) and from the Perth region in the Bunbury Trough of the Perth Basin (A$10 per tonne). We include sensitivity analyses examining the effects on project costs of monitoring and exploration costs. We also show the results of analyses of the effect of exploration risk.

We provide recent estimates of CO₂ transport and storage costs for potential projects across Australia on a consistent basis. These illustrate the importance of various geological characteristics in determining the CO₂ injection cost, and report the relative costs of exploration, equipment, construction and monitoring. Finally we describe a quick and efficient first-pass technique for estimating well numbers.