Australia knows how to do CCS. The question is whether we’re organised enough to do it at scale.

Five things that stood out at the CO2CRC CCS Symposium 2026

Three days at the CO2CRC CCS Symposium in Melbourne this week produced a lot of insight, a lot of good conversation, and one uncomfortable conclusion: Australia is probably the best-positioned country in the world to lead on CCS, and we are still not moving fast enough.

The technology works. The geology is there. The policy language, as Minister Madeleine King made clear in her keynote, is as supportive as it has ever been. What we are still missing is the strategic coordination that turns all of those ingredients into operational projects at the scale our emissions targets actually require. 

Here are the five themes that stayed with us.

1. The gap is not technical. It’s architectural.

The symposium opened with the familiar observation that current CCS investment is a fraction of what net zero requires. But the more interesting discussion was about why. Speaker after speaker returned to the same structural problem: industry demand, technology readiness, project pipelines, and policy settings are all moving at different speeds, and no one is in charge of aligning them.

The result is a system where individual facilities cannot get to final investment decision because the storage and transport infrastructure they need does not exist; where that infrastructure cannot get built because there is no aggregated demand signal to justify it; and where the demand signal cannot consolidate because facilities are each solving the same problems in isolation. Breaking this loop requires deliberate coordination at a systems level, not just better individual project economics.

2. Somebody has to coordinate “who goes first”

One of the most practically useful ideas to surface at the symposium was deceptively simple: in a hub-and-spoke CCS system, the sequencing of projects matters enormously. Early movers do not just abate their own emissions; they build the shared infrastructure that makes the next tranche of projects viable. That means the identity and timing of early movers is a strategic question, not just a commercial one.

LETA has been making this argument for some time. A national CCUS strategy that maps industry demand against storage prospects, defines priority hubs and corridors, and actively sequences the build-out is not a nice-to-have. It is the mechanism that converts a series of competing individual projects into a self-reinforcing pipeline. EY-Parthenon modelling from 2025 shows 50 megatonnes of annual abatement by 2050 and $66 billion in economic activity is achievable on the east coast alone. What is still missing is the organised national effort to get there.

3. Shared infrastructure is the key, not the afterthought

The timeline pressure is real regardless of how carbon policy evolves: the 5 to 7 year lead time from investment decision to operation means that facilities facing Safeguard Mechanism obligations need to be making decisions now. But the commercial model for individual capture projects only works if the underlying transport and storage infrastructure is shared, and that infrastructure does not yet exist.

Common-user CO2 transport and storage assets, developed on open-access terms, are the difference between facilities that can become bankable hubs and facilities that are perpetually stranded at feasibility stage. The symposium reinforced what LETA has argued in policy submissions: aligning investment settings with the parts of the system that unlock multiple projects at once, particularly storage appraisal and shared pipeline infrastructure, should be the priority for any government serious about industrial decarbonisation.

4. The APAC window is open, but it will not stay that way

International speakers from Japan and Indonesia brought a useful external lens to the proceedings. The picture from the region is of significant and growing demand for CO2 storage capacity, strong government commitment to CCS as a decarbonisation tool, and an active search for reliable storage partners. Australia is the natural candidate, but Japan and Korea are not waiting indefinitely for Australian regulatory and infrastructure settings to catch up with their own timelines.

The regional dimension makes the domestic urgency even sharper. Australia’s geological and technical advantages in CCS are a genuine competitive asset in a world where hard-to-abate industries across Asia need credible abatement pathways. But assets only generate returns when they are activated. Bilateral frameworks, offshore storage permitting for imported CO2, and investment in port and pipeline connectivity all need to progress in parallel with the domestic project pipeline.

5. The Safeguard review is the most important near-term decision

Technical sessions across the program demonstrated genuine progress on monitoring and verification, subsurface characterisation, and AI-assisted modelling. The science is ahead of the deployment. What is not ahead of the deployment is the regulatory and commercial architecture that lets the science translate into projects.

The 2026-27 Safeguard review is the clearest opportunity on the horizon to fix that. Participants were broadly aligned: if the settings are right, the review can trigger industrial decarbonisation investment at a scale not yet seen in Australia; if they fall short, the investment community will draw its own conclusions. Streamlining and harmonising regulatory frameworks across federal, state, and territory governments, creating faster and more transparent approvals pathways, and clarifying how CCS abatement is recognised and verified under the carbon policy settings are not small asks. But they are what is needed for industry to move from feasibility to construction.

So what?

Australia does not have a technology problem. It does not have a geology problem. It does not even, at the moment, have a political will problem (CCS features in the Labor Government’s Future Gas Strategy). What it has is a coordination problem, and that is a solvable one. The CO2CRC Symposium is one of the few forums where the full system, research, operators, policy, and finance sit in the same room and talk honestly about what is blocking progress. The conversations this week confirmed both the scale of the opportunity and the specific actions needed to capture it.

LETA will keep making the case for the national strategy, the shared infrastructure, and the sequenced pipeline that closes the gap between ambition and deployment.