Chevron's carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility at its Gorgon LNG plant in Australia underperformed in 2021 with 2.26 million tons of carbon dioxide injected underground, well below its annual capacity of 4 million tons per year of CO2.
For comparison, annual CO2 emissions by Australia is 494.2 million tons per year
Chevron's CCS project has been working well below its annual capacity since it was launched in August 2019, three years after the Gorgon LNG project began operations, as the company grappled with new technology and technical problems.
Sand issues
One of the major issues has been the presence of sand that has clogged parts of the CCS project. This prompted Chevron to significantly reduce the amount of CO2 injected underground.
But how would you increase the reaction rates of silica weathering and sediment burial rates? About half of dissolved inorganic carbon from rivers is recycled by pythoplanktons in the surface ocean and only a small small fraction made it to the bottom of the ocean. Silicate weathering as means of carbon burial only works at million years timescale, and we need something can be industrialized at mass scale to pull CO2 from the atmosphere within 20 years
That’s the part we are working on figuring out, but it is by far the most promising method to operate at the enormous scale necessary for carbon sequestration