Geoscience Australia, under the Australian Government’s Resourcing Australia’s Prosperity initiative and in collaboration with key Australian federal, state and territory organisations, is leading the development of a new, play-based national assessment of Australia’s CO2 geological storage resources – the National Carbon Dioxide Storage Resource Atlas. The Atlas, to be delivered in late 2028, will provide detailed, pragmatic and consistent national-scale information about Australia’s storage resources to help support policy and decision-making by governments, regulators, the carbon capture and storage (CCS) industry, researchers and the broader community. The Atlas builds on the substantial volume of work that has been completed across Australia over the past 25 years to deliver comprehensive and defensible national-scale information including: the location of potential storage resources; their quality and suitability for large-scale, near to medium-term storage; and the scale of CCS industry that could be realistically supported to help meet Australia’s emissions reductions targets and maintain Australia at the forefront of the CCS industry. The assessment 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 to prospect-scale evaluations in order to identify play fairways, prospects and assess injectivity and capacity in promising plays. Individual assessments will then be combined to produce a national-scale composite play fairways map.
Kalinowski et al. (Wed,) studied this question.