<
https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-great-carbon-capture-con-too-expensive-even-for-woodside/>
"Meg O’Neill just said the quiet part out loud. The CEO of Woodside,
Australia’s largest fossil gas producer, told the
Australian Financial Review
that making deep cuts to her company’s emissions would be too expensive.
Not too complex. Not too early. Not too reliant on emerging tech. Just too
expensive. After years of glossy brochures and net-zero diagrams that leaned
hard on carbon capture and storage as a silver bullet, the executive at the
helm of one of Australia’s biggest emitters just admitted what insiders have
known for decades: this dog won’t hunt.
This is the clearest signal yet that even the companies who pitched CCS as
their get-out-of-jail-free card no longer believe in the economics. O’Neill
pegged carbon capture at $200 to $500 per tonne. That’s not a rounding
error—that’s a giant red sign that says, “No business case here.”
It also obliterates the fantasy that carbon capture can clean up LNG operations
or offer a credible bridge to a lower-emissions future. This isn’t a strategy.
It’s a delaying tactic with a giant price tag. And now the curtain’s been
pulled back by one of its most enthusiastic former supporters.
Of course, Woodside isn’t alone in this slow-motion walkback. Darren Woods, the
CEO of ExxonMobil, recently said that Direct Air Capture—the shiny new thing
that was supposed to suck carbon out of thin air and make everything okay—costs
between $600 and $1,000 a tonne.
For comparison, the carbon price in the EU hovers around €65, and Australia is
still mostly fiddling with credits and voluntary schemes. If you’re dropping a
grand to avoid a tonne of emissions, you’d better be mining moon rocks or
selling miracle cures.
And yet, until recently, DAC was paraded around as the future. Woods, to his
credit, now admits it needs to be more than five times cheaper before it’s
remotely scalable. That’s not a pilot project. That’s a confession."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
