Meg O’Neill just said the quiet part out loud. The CEO of Woodside, Australia’s largest fossil gas producer, told the Australian Financial Review that making deep cuts to her company’s emissions would be too expensive.
Not too complex. Not too early. Not too reliant on emerging tech. Just too expensive. After years of glossy brochures and net-zero diagrams that leaned hard on carbon capture and storage as a silver bullet, the executive at the helm of one of Australia’s biggest emitters just admitted what insiders have known for decades: this dog won’t hunt.
This is the clearest signal yet that even the companies who pitched CCS as their get-out-of-jail-free card no longer believe in the economics. O’Neill pegged carbon capture at $200 to $500 per tonne. That’s not a rounding error—that’s a giant red sign that says, “No business case here.”
It also obliterates the fantasy that carbon capture can clean up LNG operations or offer a credible bridge to a lower-emissions future. This isn’t a strategy. It’s a delaying tactic with a giant price tag. And now the curtain’s been pulled back by one of its most enthusiastic former supporters.
Of course, Woodside isn’t alone in this slow-motion walkback. Darren Woods, the CEO of ExxonMobil, recently said that Direct Air Capture—the shiny new thing that was supposed to suck carbon out of thin air and make everything okay—costs between $600 and $1,000 a tonne.
For comparison, the carbon price in the EU hovers around €65, and Australia is still mostly fiddling with credits and voluntary schemes. If you’re dropping a grand to avoid a tonne of emissions, you’d better be mining moon rocks or selling miracle cures.
And yet, until recently, DAC was paraded around as the future. Woods, to his credit, now admits it needs to be more than five times cheaper before it’s remotely scalable. That’s not a pilot project. That’s a confession.
For over two decades, the fossil fuel industry has leaned hard on CCS to keep the music playing. In the early 2000s, Shell, BP, Chevron, and yes, Woodside, pitched carbon capture as a proven technology that just needed a little public funding and a bit of political will.
The technology, they said, was sound. The costs would come down. The learning curve would do its magic. Governments bought it. Billions flowed. But nothing resembling scale ever arrived. Instead, we got a few expensive demonstration projects, endless white papers, and emissions that just kept rising.
Shell was among the loudest cheerleaders. In 2008, Shell’s then-CEO Jeroen van der Veer declared carbon capture “an essential technology to mitigate climate change,” claiming that “with the right policies, CCS could be widely deployed by 2020.”
The company funded the Quest CCS project in Alberta, which began operating in 2015. Shell called it a success, but failed to mention that over CAD $865 million of the $1.3 billion capital cost came from government subsidies. And even with that, the project captured about one-third less CO₂ than initially promised during its early operational years.
Meanwhile, internal documents revealed years later by a U.S. House Oversight investigation showed Shell analysts admitting in 2017 that CCS was “nowhere near competitive or cost-effective” and warning the technology would not scale in time to be useful. “The window for CCS to remain relevant with governments and society is closing quickly,” the document stated.
BP played a similar game. It co-founded the Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton in 2000, aligning itself with the idea that CCS could square the circle of fossil fuels and climate action. At one point BP was involved in multiple projects, including a proposed CCS plant in California and a retrofit at its In Salah gas field in Algeria.
But most of these projects quietly faded or underperformed. A 2016 internal BP presentation acknowledged the elephant in the room: “carbon capture [and] hydrogen…are faltering,” and renewable energy was winning on cost and momentum.
Despite that, BP kept telling the public and policymakers that CCS was vital and must be supported through subsidies and incentives.
Chevron, meanwhile, gave us Gorgon—Australia’s most expensive and instructive carbon capture misadventure. When it was approved in 2009, Chevron promised Gorgon would capture 4 million tonnes of CO₂ per year from its gas processing facilities.
But delays pushed the CO₂ injection start date to 2019, and by mid-2021 Chevron admitted it had missed its five-year target by around 5 million tonnes. The Western Australian government allowed it to use carbon offsets instead.
Independent estimates later pegged Gorgon’s actual cost per tonne of CO₂ stored at over A$220, making it one of the most expensive forms of abatement ever attempted. Chevron Australia’s managing director tried to spin this in 2023 by calling it a “learning experience.” If learning that gravity pulls downward costs billions, maybe you’re not learning fast enough.
Even Woodside, which now says CCS is too expensive, was in on the game. The company looked at CCS options for its Browse Basin and Burrup Hub projects, promoted its involvement in CCS research, and called for regulatory frameworks to support the technology.
Fast forward to 2025, and Meg O’Neill has walked it all back with a single, devastatingly honest line. The same company that once gestured toward CCS as a solution is now shrugging off the tech as financially unworkable—because it is. O’Neill is still pretending that cost take outs are viable despite decades of global failures by every organization working on it, however.
Governments were all too eager to believe the hype. Alberta’s government in Canada launched a $2 billion CCS fund in 2008. The U.S. spent billions through the Department of Energy under both Obama and Bush. The result? Projects were cancelled, shelved, or delivered less than promised.
Norway abandoned Mongstad after it became clear the price tag was ballooning and the technology wasn’t delivering learning benefits. The U.S. Government Accountability Office found in 2021 that 8 of 11 major CCS projects funded by DOE failed to meet their objectives or were scrapped outright, despite generous subsidies.
Norway’s Mongstad project was supposed to be the global proving ground for carbon capture—a full-scale demonstration that would kickstart a CCS revolution. Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg famously dubbed it “Norway’s moon landing,” a grand national gesture toward climate leadership.
But after years of delays and ballooning budgets, the government pulled the plug. The final price tag approached €3 billion, and the project delivered no breakthrough, no learning curve, and no follow-on projects. Stoltenberg later admitted that building the plant wouldn’t reduce costs or inspire imitation, bluntly stating, “The high cost would not inspire others to build CCS plants.”
That’s the quiet part most governments never say out loud: they didn’t just lose the money, they lost the plot. Norway had the political will, the funding, and the engineering expertise—if CCS couldn’t be made to work there, where exactly was it supposed to work?
All of it was predicated on a fantasy. The idea that CCS, with enough public money, would follow a classic experience curve. But there was never a market-based driver for that curve.
Meanwhile, the real solutions—solar, wind, batteries, transmission—got cheaper every year. They didn’t need moonshot subsidies or faith-based policy. They just worked. But they also threatened the core business model of fossil companies, which is to keep extracting and selling as much as possible for as long as possible.
So CCS became the magic word. It allowed these companies to sell expansion as climate action. New gas fields? Don’t worry, they’ll be CCS-ready. Giant LNG ports? They’ll capture carbon once it’s viable. It was always about postponing the reckoning.
Even now, CCS is still baked into every major oil and gas company’s climate plan. Not because it works, but because without it, those plans collapse under their own weight.
The Pathways Alliance in Canada is trying to line up billions in government support to build a CCS network for the oil sands. In the US, fossil companies are lining up for 45Q tax credits. And here in Australia, CCS is still being floated as a key part of emissions reductions—even as Woodside’s own CEO waves the white flag.
Let’s call this what it is: institutionalized wishful thinking. Carbon capture isn’t an emissions strategy. It’s a messaging strategy. It’s the thing you point to when you want to keep drilling but still show up to climate summits without getting pelted with tomatoes. It’s the fig leaf for business-as-usual.
The math never worked. The physics was always against it. And now, finally, the economics are catching up. When the CEO of one of the world’s largest gas companies says it’s not worth it, maybe it’s time we stop pretending it is.
Australia has the resources, the engineering talent, and the sunlight to decarbonize without this kind of expensive fantasy. It doesn’t need a marginal, failure-prone, subsidy-hungry technology to keep fossil fuels alive a few years longer. It needs serious investment in things that actually cut emissions at scale, fast, and affordably.
The only thing carbon capture has successfully captured is public money and political will. It’s time to stop throwing good cash after bad science fiction. And it’s time for the clean energy conversation in the country to move on from the stories fossil companies tell themselves when they’re afraid of the future.
