It doesn’t look like much, but this facility is testing the future of CO2 (Image: CO2CRC)

THERE are more cows than people here in Nirranda South, three hours south-west of Melbourne, making it the perfect spot to test a technology that remains hugely controversial.

I am at a facility run by Australia’s Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies (CO2CRC). If anyone can convince the public that carbon capture and storage can reliably reduce carbon dioxide emissions it’s these guys. Even Friends of the Earth, Australia – which opposes the approach – has grudging respect for the research done here.

Wherever permeable and porous rock is capped by an impermeable layer, a natural gas store may form. Such stores can trap gas for tens of millions of years, making spent oil and gas fields a logical choice for industrial CO 2 storage.


But these spent fields are small, and can store only so much CO 2 – up to 900 gigatonnes worldwide, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A more common type of subterranean structure – deep saline aquifers – has the potential to store up to 100,000 gigatonnes. The problem? It is not clear that these aquifers, which naturally house salty water, can keep hold of CO 2 . “It’s very difficult to predict how the gas will move underground,” says Peter Cook, a hydrologist at Flinders University in Adelaide. That’s where the Nirranda South facility comes in.

Above ground, the facility is just a few shipping containers, a series of pipes that snake around the muddy floor, and a large white container filled with CO 2 . But beneath my feet, some 1500 metres down, is a saline aquifer.

At the end of June, two tracer gases – krypton and xenon – were injected into the saline aquifer, says Josie McInerney, the community liaison officer for CO2CRC. When I arrived last week, hydrologist Allison Hortle and colleagues were busy sucking up salty water samples every hour over a four day period to track how the tracers travelled through the aquifer. The results will help predict how CO 2 is likely to behave under similar circumstances, Hortle says.

Or so it is hoped. Matthias Raab, the programme manager of the site, tells me, euphemistically, that using the tracers “is highly experimental” – in other words, it is not clear that noble gases behave as CO 2 does. So this week the team will inject 150 tonnes of CO 2 into the aquifer, and compare its movements with the tracers.

It’s this slow-and-steady testing approach that has garnered respect from Friends of the Earth, Australia. “We have trust in the monitoring regimes of CO2CRC,” says Cam Walker, a spokesperson for the organisation. “But it’s sucking up a lot of the money that should be going to renewables.”

Australia is spending A$1.6 billion over five years on carbon capture and storage technology. According to Walker, that cash could buy three large solar power stations.

Raab points out that solar power is not yet ready to fully replace fossil fuels, though. “Carbon capture cannot be the only solution to reducing carbon emissions, but it is has to be part of it,” he says.