Australia's CCS Ambitions Take Shape at Moomba

Santos hit its 2030 emissions target five years early and is now building a commercial carbon storage business targeting 14Mt annually by 2040

19 Feb 2026

Santos, the Australian gas producer, has begun repositioning itself as a carbon management services company, a shift underpinned by the early operational success of its Moomba carbon capture and storage facility in South Australia. The company announced in its 2025 full-year results, released in February 2026, that it had reached its 2030 emissions reduction target of 30 percent five years ahead of schedule, with Moomba identified as the primary driver.

The facility, operated jointly with Beach Energy, has permanently stored more than 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 since injection began in September 2024. In November 2025, Australia's Clean Energy Regulator issued 614,133 Australian Carbon Credit Units for the project's first six months of operations, the single largest allocation in the scheme's history. Total credits exceeded 900,000 by year's end. At full capacity, Moomba can sequester up to 1.7 million tonnes annually at a lifecycle cost below $30 per tonne, which Santos said positions it among the lowest-cost CCS operations worldwide.

That performance has anchored a broader commercial ambition. Santos has set a target to store approximately 14 million tonnes of third-party CO2 per year by 2040, equivalent, the company said, to roughly half of its 2023 Scope 3 emissions. A second phase of the Moomba project, currently in concept development, would extend storage services to domestic industrial emitters and Asian buyers, with memoranda of understanding already in place with Japanese energy firms.

Santos is not alone in this repositioning. Woodside Energy is advancing a proposed multi-user carbon storage hub near Karratha in Western Australia through pre-FEED studies, targeting up to five million tonnes of annual capacity and a potential final investment decision in 2026. The Australian government announced A$32.6 million in new funding for carbon management technologies in March 2026, reinforcing the policy conditions both companies are counting on. Yet the gap between project economics and industrial-scale execution remains untested, and how quickly third-party demand materializes will determine whether these ambitions translate into durable business models.