SK E&S, a natural gas provider of SK Group, and Australian energy company Santos will collaborate to develop a transboundary carbon capture and storage (CCS) business that collects carbon dioxide (CO2) generated in South Korea and transports it to storage in Australia.
SK E&S announced on Nov. 31 that it signed a business agreement with Santos on Oct. 30 in Sydney, Australia, for mutual cooperation on the promotion of transboundary CCS between Korea and Australia.
Under the agreement, the two companies will cooperate in the development of future transboundary CCS projects between Korea and Australia, based on the CO2 reservoirs in Australia that they are jointly developing, including the G-11-AP field offshore the Northern Territory of Australia.
The G-11-AP CO₂ storage project is a CCS exploration project to inject CO₂ into an aquifer in the Bonaparte Basin offshore northern Australia. The aquifer is a formation with high-salinity formation water (brine), and it is considered to be an optimized formation for CO₂ storage along with depleted oil and gas fields because CO₂ can be safely stored in a space that was once filled with brine.
In August last year, SK E&S secured the right to explore the G-11-AP concession in collaboration with global energy companies such as Santos and Chevron, and plans to develop the concession into a CO₂ repository through procedures such as business feasibility verification.
The two companies will cooperate to ensure that the border-crossing CCS project, which collects CO₂ generated in South Korea and transports and stores it to a storage facility in Australia, can be realized in earnest by utilizing the field as a storage facility.
With the signing of the MOU, SK E&S and Santos plan to expand on their existing collaboration to develop CCS storage projects and solidify their collaboration to develop various cross-border CCS projects.
The two companies are already working on a plan to utilize the Bayu-Undan depleted gas field in neighboring Timor-Leste waters as a CO₂ storage facility in conjunction with the Barossa Gas Project in Australia. CO₂ from the Barossa Gas Field's natural gas production will be captured and permanently stored in the Bayu-Undan gas field, and CO₂ from the domestic production of blue hydrogen using low-carbon LNG will also be captured and stored in the Bayu-Undan gas field.
If the additional CO₂ storage is successfully developed, SK E&S will have a "global CCS hub" centered offshore northern Australia and East Timor.
