CCUS Gets a Pacific Upgrade: Seoul Meets Sydney

Australia and South Korea bet on geology and industrial need to build the Asia-Pacific's first cross-border carbon storage axis

4 Dec 2025

A country with the right rocks and a neighbour with the wrong emissions: it is an unlikely basis for a strategic alliance, but Australia and South Korea are building one around carbon capture, utilisation and storage. The two governments signed a Green Economy Partnership Arrangement on Climate and Energy in December 2024, with Australian Minister Chris Bowen and Korean counterpart Ahn Dukgeun placing CCUS alongside clean hydrogen and critical minerals as the arrangement's load-bearing pillars.

The partnership has since acquired institutional scaffolding. An inaugural Australia-Korea Clean Energy Roundtable, held in Sydney on 20 November 2025, drew 25 senior executives and government officials from both countries. Organised by the Australian Chamber of Commerce in Korea, with support from HWLE Lawyers and Elecseed, the closed-door forum included representatives from POSCO Australia, LG Energy Solution Australia, Hanwha Energy Australia, KEPCO Australia and the Port of Newcastle. Financing barriers, policy alignment and certification standards dominated the agenda, echoing concerns raised at an earlier business forum in Seoul in February 2025.

Australia's geological case is strong. It already hosts two of the world's largest carbon storage projects, whose combined sequestration capacity is said to equal removing one million vehicles from roads each year. Crucially, Australia completed international requirements for transboundary carbon dioxide transport in late 2024, which opens the door for Korean industrial emitters to ship captured CO₂ to Australian storage sites. For steelmakers, petrochemical producers and other hard-to-abate industries, that option is valuable precisely because domestic storage alternatives in South Korea are limited.

The arrangement links three Australian government departments with South Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, and establishes a joint ministerial meeting to oversee delivery. For South Korea, this is its first Green Economy Partnership of any kind, suggesting ambitions to replicate the model with other trading partners.

Yet the gap between bilateral goodwill and commercial reality remains wide. Project financing for CCUS at scale is notoriously difficult, certification standards across borders are unresolved, and sequestration costs tend to fall on industries least able to absorb them. Whether geological compatibility and shared net-zero targets are enough to close that gap by 2050 is a question neither roundtable has yet answered.