Western Australia has “the tank, the skills and the customers” to establish a carbon capture and storage business, Shell Australia’s Vice President Commercial Virang Gadoya told the Energy Club’s August dinner.

“What’s not to like,” he said. “WA should be excited because it is blessed by nature. This place has amazing geology and reservoirs to really store CO2.

“It has the skills, whether it is subsurface engineering, reservoir engineering, facilities engineering, ports... (and) most importantly the relationships with our customers in Japan and Korea who are looking for decarbonisation of their own energy systems.

CCS requires support from government, regulatory policies that enable it, and “a bit of an enterprise” but otherwise, “this place has got an amazing potential to do CCS as a business”.

Asked what was preventing CCS from developing faster, Mr Gadoya said while the technology was mature, incentives to adopt lower emissions technologies are also a factor.

“If you look at Australia's safeguard mechanism, it only covers 28 per cent of emissions,” he said. “The other 72 per cent are not covered. And even the 28 per cent is going to get reviewed in couple of years. So, there is no certainty, and hence an incentive for people to really pay for that at this point of time. In a presentation and question-and-answer session, Mr Gadoya also discussed Shell’s journey in Australia, talent and collaboration.

“We have been here for 123 years. We were there at the start of Australian Federation in 1901 and we’ve gone through lots of energy transitions in the country itself. We started the first refinery, which is still working, and we fuelled the first Qantas flight,” he said.

Today Shell has projects in Queensland and WA, including Prelude, Crux and QGC, and is involved in others as a non-operator, including Gorgon, the North West Shelf and Arrow.

It is also involved in two CCS projects including as a partner in Gorgon CCS and in the Angel CCS project.

“We have tens of billions of dollars invested here,” Mr Gadoya said. “We paid more than $2.5 billion in Australian tax and royalties, but one thing that probably is less well understood is that Australia in Shell punches way above its weight on talent.

“Some of our senior people in Shell globally are Australians. They have been trained, worked in Australia, and have done well in Australia, and they've been doing fantastic things in very senior roles. So, it's a big talent hub for Shell globally.”

On collaboration, he said Australia had improved over the past 15 years.

“I've definitely seen that there is a greater desire to work on common purpose, common goals, which is fantastic,” Mr Gadoya said.

 “If we all collaborate to make the productivity even better, then there is nothing that will stop this country," he said.

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