Moomba Carbon Capture and Storage Project

Moomba Carbon Capture and Storage Project is a Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) project located at the Moomba Gas Plant in the Cooper Basin, approximately 770km northeast of Adelaide in South Australia. It was registered in November 2021. While the specific surface area of the project is unspecified, the operations span extensive underground geological formations.

Carbon Capture and Storage projects involve capturing greenhouse gases that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere, compressing and transporting them, and injecting them deep underground into geological formations for permanent storage. Under the 2021 Carbon Capture and Storage methodology, projects must directly measure the volume of greenhouse gases captured and safely stored to ensure no emissions escape and to generate carbon credits.

The Moomba region is situated in the Strzelecki Desert, an area characterized by an arid climate and extremely low average annual rainfall of approximately 205mm. The surrounding environment consists of low-lying plains and sand dunes with highly weathered, inherently infertile sandy soils. General land use in this remote region is heavily dominated by large-scale resource extraction, specifically oil and gas operations, as well as sparse pastoral cattle grazing across vast unincorporated tracts of native vegetation.

Interestingly, this joint venture, operated by Santos and co-owned by Beach Energy, is one of the largest and lowest-cost CCS projects in the world. It is designed to safely store up to 1.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year in depleted natural gas reservoirs. In late 2024 to early 2025, the project reached a historic milestone by receiving over 900,000 Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs), marking the largest single issuance for a CCS project in Australia's history and setting a major precedent for industrial decarbonization.