CCS isn't climate action, it's an offset scam

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is an offsets zombie the government keeps trying to raise from the dead to prop up the future of fossil fuel projects.

The Australian Government keeps talking up CCS like it’s a breakthrough that will become viable – one day – and solve our ‘energy and climate realities’. That reality being the Government’s plan to keep offering up new areas for exploration and approving new coal and gas.

Fossil fuel companies talk about it like it’s essential. Regulators talk about it like it solves the problem of rising emissions.

It doesn’t.

CCS is a proven failure. It is a political tool designed to keep fossil fuel extraction going while pretending something meaningful is being done about dangerous climate change.

And the list of failures and companies quiet quitting proposals is growing larger with the recent withdrawal of the Inpex Bonaparte CCS (BCCS) proposal. The same BCCS proposal the Albanese Government gave major project status (as part of a renewable energy project no less ) in July 2025.

The Government subsidies and greenwashing were strong with this one.

The BCCS project would be Australia’s first offshore carbon dumping experiment, as well as the world’s largest – injecting carbon dioxide from Inpex’s Ichthys plant and the proposed Middle Arm gas hub and importing emissions from our Japan and South Korea.

The BCCS proposal was also one of the central pillars of what CCS proponents are calling the ‘Sequestration Nation’ vision for Australia. Whereby Australia and the worlds carbon pollution can be imported via hubs from the NT, to Queensland, West Australia and Victoria, dumped under our oceans and regional areas as part of adjusting carbon accounting spreadsheets with offset promises.

This plan was bolstered in November 2023 when federal parliament passed amendments to the Sea Dumping Bill that now allows CO2 waste to be transported to Australia and dumped in our ocean.

The climate problem is simple at its core. Burning fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – releases carbon dioxide. To stop warming, we must burn less of it.

CCS is a greenwash to help industry and governments avoids that reality. It exists to sell the continuation, and in fact expansion, of extracting and burning fossil fuels.

The record of CCS is clear. Projects are slow, expensive, and keep failing. Almost all CCS projects never work as promised, and if they ever get off the ground only capture a small fraction of emissions.

Even the world’s biggest projects barely dent total pollution of the projects they are designed to offset. After decades of hype and billions in public subsidies, CCS remains a failure in the real world yet written up as a potential winner on fossil fuel offset ledgers and government accounting spreadsheets.

That is exactly where CCS does its most useful work.

In Australia, CCS has become a loophole under the Safeguard Mechanism. The policy is meant to cut emissions from the country’s biggest polluters. Instead, it allows emissions to keep rising, if companies can propose to “offset” them. CCS is increasingly being treated as one of the central pillars for offsetting futures.

This creates a dangerous boondoggle. Fossil fuel companies can expand gas projects, extract more fuel, burn more carbon, and then claim compliance because a CCS project exists somewhere else, or might exist in the future. Real emissions go up. Paper emissions go down. The atmosphere gets the real number.

Worse, many approvals rely on future promises. Gas fields are signed off today on the assumption that carbon pollution will be captured tomorrow. But CCS has been ‘just around the corner’ for over four decades. The pollution is real now. The reducing of emissions is always hypothetically in the future.

Globally CCS projects do not even reduce fossil fuel use. CCS was developed to increase oil and gas extraction, a term known as enhanced well recovery. This involves CO₂ being pumped into depleted wells used to push more oil and gas out to extend their ‘productive life’.

That means more extraction, more burning, and more emissions, and more dodgy offsets, all counted as climate action. It is a neat accounting trick, but it is still a trick.

For Australia, this turns CCS from a domestic boondoggle into an international gas trade and carbon dumping offsets shell game.

Countries such as Japan, and companies such as Inpex or BP get to claim offsets and climate action. Australia keeps selling the gas (with no royalties or export taxes gained) and then takes on the long-term risk of dumping carbon pollution under our ocean.

If stored carbon leaks decades from now, it will not be INPEX or BP executives dealing with the consequences. It will be Australian communities, future governments, and taxpayers. Much of that risk sits on Indigenous Sea Country, where consent is often rushed or completely ignored.

Shipping carbon pollution across oceans, compressing it, transporting it, and injecting it under the seabed also burns huge amounts of energy. Every step adds cost and risk, all to avoid the one thing that works. Cutting fossil fuel use.

Supporters of CCS say we need ‘all options on the table’. But CCS is not just another option. It actively undermines real solutions by keeping fossil fuels locked in. It builds new infrastructure that depends on continued extraction. And under the Safeguard Mechanism, it gives political cover for approving new gas projects while claiming climate responsibility via offsets.

Renewable energy does not need offsets. Wind and solar cut emissions directly. Electrification and energy efficiency reduce pollution immediately. These solutions are working in the real world, not just on balance sheets.

CCS does not fail because it is misunderstood. It fails because it does not work.

At some point, burning and extracting fossil fuels must stop. Australia has made signals to this and signed onto an international agreement to phase out fossil fuels at COP30. It’s time we dump the CCS offsets boondoggle and make the fossil fuel phase out a policy priority.