Petronas, TotalEnergies and Mitsui & Co. recently signed a joint venture agreement to jointly develop an offshore carbon dioxide storage block in Peninsular Malaysia. This project is a core component of the Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Hub in southern Malaysia, and will help Malaysia achieve its medium- and long-term goals of carbon neutrality and low-carbon transformation of the oil and gas industry.

Under the agreement, the three parties will establish an independent joint venture company, which will be uniformly responsible for the development planning, engineering construction, commercial promotion and long-term operation and management after commissioning of this CCS project. The first phase of the project is located in a depleted gas field offshore Peninsular Malaysia to carry out storage operations. Relying on the geological storage conditions of mature oil and gas fields, it reduces the risks of geological assessment and development. The maximum storage capacity of the first phase is designed to reach 5 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, and it is planned to achieve the commissioning of carbon dioxide injection in 2031.

At present, the project is still in the early development stage. Before making the Final Investment Decision (FID), the three parties will continue to carry out detailed geological exploration, wellbore transformation, monitoring plan design, environmental impact assessment, business model refinement and compliance approval, etc., to further consolidate the technical plan, implement the connection of gas sources, and improve the cost framework and risk sharing mechanism.

As a major oil and gas country in Southeast Asia, Malaysia is accelerating the layout of the CCS industry chain, and building a regional carbon storage hub relying on offshore abandoned oil and gas reservoirs. On the one hand, it provides carbon storage outlets for its own high-emission industrial entities such as oil refining, chemical industry and power generation; on the other hand, it also meets the cross-border CO₂ transportation and storage needs in the region, and builds a Southeast Asian CCS infrastructure node. TotalEnergies and Mitsui & Co. will also participate in the project implementation by virtue of their own experience in carbon storage engineering, carbon asset management and international gas source trade.

From:ChemNet