TotalEnergies and Petronas to collaborate on solar project to decarbonise Australia’s Gladstone LNG

FRENCH oil and gas giant, TotalEnergies and Gentari Renewables, a subsidiary of Petronas, are teaming up to develop a solar farm in Queensland to lower emissions at Gladstone LNG – one of Australia’s largest LNG facilities and a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Achieving reductions in the LNG industry is important for meeting Australia’s emissions reduction target of 43% below 2005 levels by 2030.

The Gladstone LNG project (GLNG) on Gladstone Island in Queensland, Australia, processes the coal seam gas (CSG) resources of the Bowen and Surat basins into liquefied natural gas (LNG) for sale in Asian markets. LNG produced at the facility was first shipped in 2017, and it is anticipated to have a 25-year production life.

Under their agreement, TotalEnergies and Gentari will jointly develop the 100 MW Pleasant Hills Solar Project, which will supply low-carbon electricity to the Roma field’s gas production and processing facilities. The Roma Shallow Gas Project Area (RSGPA) is centred around three townships, Roma, Wallumbilla and Yuleba, and spans approximately 259,652 ha. It is one of three project areas along with Fairview and Arcadia Valley, that make up the GLNG site.

TotalEnergies and Petronas each hold a 27.5% stake in GLNG, while Santos is the majority owner with 30%. South Korean public natural gas company, KOGAS, holds the remaining 15% interest.

Gentari, a clean energy company wholly owned by Petronas, said the project is the first of several GLNG assets identified for decarbonisation as part of the firm’s emissions reduction roadmap.  

Sushil Purohit, CEO of Gentari, said: “To achieve our joint decarbonisation goals, it is critical to harness all our capabilities, capacity and resources efficiently. This includes optimising our existing partnerships and working to decarbonise our own business entities. Gentari’s latest partnership with TotalEnergies therefore, will provide a new momentum in our net-zero efforts, and to build the right ecosystem for growth in clean energy and net zero solutions.”

Gentari is also working with Sembcorp, an energy and urban development company, to further accelerate the expansion of renewable energy and hydrogen-related initiatives across Southeast Asia.

TotalEnergies is also partnering again with Petronas to develop a carbon storage hub in Malaysia. The project, which involves Mitsui, will evaluate several CO2 storage sites in the Malay Basin, including both saline aquifers and depleted offshore fields with an aim to provide decarbonisation services for industrial customers in Asia.

An emission heavy industry

Australia’s LNG business is booming. Facilities across the country currently produce around 88m t/y of LNG, and between 2020 and 2021 export volumes reached 83m t – that’s enough LNG to rival Qatar as the world’s largest exporter. The business is also very lucrative. Australia’s LNG export earnings doubled from AU$30bn in 2020/21 to AU$70bn in 2021/22, and it is forecast to reach AU$90 billion in 2022/23.

But with increased production comes an increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. By 2019, GHG emissions across Australia had risen to 60m t/y, up from 13m t/y just five years prior.  

And when it comes to gas extraction methods, emissions can vary significantly. CSG for example is produced in the extensive gas fields at very low pressure, from thousands of low-productivity wells. Santos has reported that GLNG could require more than 6,600 CSG wells should the project expand to 10m t/y of LNG gas production – a figure that is “extremely conservative”, the firm said. Conversely, conventional gas is found at much greater depth and pressure, and so may supply a typical LNG plant with only 5–15 wells.

According to a report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, this vast number of wells can lead to significant leakage of methane from the tens or hundreds of thousands of joints, seals and unlit flares in the remote and widespread production and pipeline system.  

Although the magnitude of these methane emissions via such leakage has been investigated in various studies in recent years, it has been found to be “extremely difficult to measure accurately” but is “significantly larger than stated by gas operators and accepted by regulators,” the report’s author says. The report also adds that as many as 40,000 wells may be drilled to supply gas to the LNG plants in Gladstone.

Furthermore, most of the energy for the complex compression system required to deliver the CSG to LNG plants that are often hundreds of kilometres away, is supplied by grid electricity which is mostly coalfired. The transmission pipeline connecting the Fairview gas field to Gladstone coast for instance is 420-km long.  

Capturing some of these emissions and injecting them back into depleted natural gas and oil reservoirs would go some way to helping Australia reach its net zero targets. Projects to do this are already underway.   

Chevron’s Gorgon LNG plant in Western Australia, which is estimated to have between 5.45–8.81m t/y of CO2e emissions, is also home to a CCS project dubbed the world’s largest. More than 8m t of CO2 have been injected to date, and Chevron say that more than 100m t of CO2 are expected to be mitigated over the life of the CCS system.  

Meanwhile Santos is building a 1.7m t/y CCS facility at its Moomba gas plant in South Australia, and it has also signed agreements with four potential customers for CO2 storage at the firm’s Bayu-Undan CCS project located off the coast of Southeast Asia’s Timor-Leste, for which front end engineering design work is nearing completion.  

Although Santos has budgeted plans for electrification activities at Gladstone, which it predicts will generate between 5 and 7.2m t/y of CO2e emissions, currently there is no CCS facility planned.  

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