Over the past 25 years, the CCS community has sought to understand Australia’s potential CO₂ storage resources. Collectively, we have completed a great deal of high-quality work on storage site assessments, yet we are still lacking a comprehensive and defensible national-scale picture of where our storage resources are located, their potential, and an understanding of the scale of CCS industry that can realistically be supported. This understanding is essential to help meet Australia’s - and potentially our region’s - emissions reductions targets, and for effective planning, regulatory oversight and investment – all targeted to more rapidly put Australia at the forefront of the CCS industry.

Under the Australian Government’s Resourcing Australia’s Prosperity initiative, Geoscience Australia, in collaboration with key stakeholders, is leading the development of the National Carbon Dioxide Storage Resource Atlas. The Atlas will provide both national and sub-basin scale data on the location, capacity, injectivity and integrity of Australia’s geological storage resources within a long-lived framework that incorporates existing and new assessments, and allows for refinement as new areas are investigated, new scientific findings come to light, and more CO₂ storage projects become operational.

Our approach is based on the play-based exploration pyramid and is designed to be consistent with the CO₂ Storage Resource Management System. This includes a tiered assessment process, progressing from basin-scale assessments to play then prospect scale evaluations in order to identify play fairways, leads and assess injectivity and capacity in promising plays. These assessments will be assimilated into a big picture,  national-scale play-fairways ‘map’ that will particularly assist with regional planning, source-sink matching and identification of gaps to focus future work.