Australia is becoming the world's carbon dumping ground

The Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) asked what we thought about Australia importing other countries’ carbon pollution and dumping it under our oceans. Submissions on the plan, which would see Singapore ship its industrial CO2 to Australia for a fee to be pumped into depleted oil and gas fields off our coast, have now closed. 

If that sounds like a big step, it isn’t. The groundwork was laid three years ago in federal parliament, and almost nobody noticed. 

In November 2023, the then-new Albanese Government passed the Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment Act. In a now infamous speech by Senator Wong where she said the quiet part out loud about the Government’s new Sea Dumping Bill…that it’s for the fossil fuel industry. 

Before that bill, dumping carbon dioxide in the sea for storage was treated as exactly what it is: dumping waste. The amendment changed that. CO2 captured overseas can now be exported to Australia, injected into the seabed, and counted as an offset. What used to be prohibited is now a permitted commercial transaction, so long as the right permits are issued. 

That single change is what made this consultation possible. Without it, there would be no legal pathway for Singapore, or anyone else, to send us their carbon pollution at all. 

Two years later, Resources Minister Madeleine King stood up at the launch of a report by Low Emissions Technology Australia (LETA) and gave this ambition a name. The report, produced by EY for LETA, models three futures for CCS in Australia’s eastern states: Moderate Growth, Accelerated Deployment, and, at the top, “Sequestration Nation”, where CCS becomes “core national infrastructure” capturing (just maybe) up to 50 million tonnes of CO2 a year.  

Minister King has since described Australia as having the “right geology and regulatory framework” to become a global CCS hub. The fossil fuel industry has added to this list of attributes a lot of space with low population and many regional areas perfect for carbon pollution dumping – because it won’t all be offshore in their view. Officials are now working toward a bilateral instrument with Singapore, with ministers on both sides aiming to finalise it by the end of this year. 

Worth noting what the report itself lists as “hard to abate”: cement, steel, chemicals and fertiliser will be customer sources, sure, but also emissions from burning gas and coal. Two fossil fuel industries, folded into a category meant to describe processes with no viable alternative. That’s precisely the sleight of hand the DCCEEW consultation paper repeats, and it’s the whole game. Once gas extraction and burning counts as “hard to abate,” almost anything can qualify for a CCS free pass. 

So, when DCCEEW asked for feedback on “facilitating” transboundary CCS, it wasn’t asking whether this should happen. It was telling us it is happening and providing some process to make us all feel consulted. 

That’s the problem. Look at what’s queued up. Singapore’s own feasibility grants for cross-border CCS went to gas-fired power generators, not cement makers. The consortium leading Singapore’s cross-border feasibility work is a partnership between Shell and ExxonMobil. Globally, the International Energy Agency’s own project database shows the majority of planned CCS capacity in the Asia Pacific sits in fossil fuel extraction and power generation, the easiest sectors of all to decarbonise with wind, solar and storage.  

Researchers at Climate Analytics have found industry routinely stretches the “hard to abate” label to justify leaning on CCS instead of making the emissions cuts that are readily available. 

There’s also the small matter of whether any of this works. Australia has exactly two operational (we won’t call them functioning) CCS projects. Gorgon, on Western Australia’s Barrow Island, started years late and still runs well below its promised capacity. Moomba, in the desert region of South Australia, appears not to be legally eligible for the offsets it’s supposed to generate.  

Norway offers the cautionary tale the consultation paper insists is a “demonstration.” At Heidelberg Materials’ plant in Brevik, independent audits found barely half the carbon captured made it to storage. When Norway’s showcase Northern Lights project launched with fanfare and two prime ministers in early September, the ship sent to carry the first shipment left port empty and sailed to Denmark instead. Norway’s state oil company, Equinor, is now pulling funding out of CCS after two decades of trying. Even the Centre for International Environmental Law has called blue ammonia projects tied to CCS “a dangerous distraction” that locks in fossil fuel dependence rather than easing it. 

None of this is a technical footnote. It’s the whole story. Every serious forecast for CCS growth, in Australia and everywhere else, has been missed. Renewable energy has avoided many multiples of the emissions that carbon capture has ever managed to store. 

Australia signed the Belém Declaration at COP30 and joined 56 other countries endorsing the Santa Marta Statement on the transition away from fossil fuels, a statement that explicitly names carbon capture and carbon offsets as false solutions. You cannot claim to be honouring that commitment while quietly building the legal and commercial architecture to import the world’s carbon pollution and dump it in our own backyard. 

If the Government wants to help the region cut emissions, it has a far better option already proven at scale: stop approving new fossil fuel projects, stop subsidising fossil fuels, support our Pacific neighbours build renewable energy, and not support rich nations like Singapore outsource their fossil fuel emissions to us. The submission window may have closed, but the issue of turning Australia into a carbon offset and dumping ground is live.