Australia has hit global headlines once again with a ‘failed CCS project’ on the Western Coast as Woodside Energy – a global energy company founded in Australia – announced the ‘eleventh hour’ decision to pull their Carbon Capture and Storage initiative from planning, citing revisions needed following changes to Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC) rules passed last year.

And, unfortunately for Australia, this is the second CCS project in almost as many months to withdraw their application from EPBC, as Inpex pulled its giant Bonaparte CCS project from the EPBC process in January, citing the same reforms just six months after it received federal major project status.

This, just weeks after the $3bn Gorgon CCS development on Barrow Island was damned by The Guardian as ‘failing’ to meet the high expectations set upon it to capture and store 4 million tonnes of CO2 per year, where it was only able to sequester 1.33m tonnes last financial year.

But what have 3 uncertain CCS projects in Australia got to do, if anything, with renewable projects in the UK?

A Cautionary Tale for the UK

The connection between these 3 projects in Australia and the UK renewable energy sector is actually quite simple: Australia is providing the UK with a real-time “stress test” of the global fossil fuel industry’s favourite climate solution of the moment, whilst sending several clear messages to our government:

Storage alone is not a viable, long term solution: the Australian projects prove that sequestering and storing carbon alone is not a viable, long term solution and the key to lowering carbon emissions in a meaningful, sustainable way is actually to use it; not only because injecting it under the sea bed or into the ground comes with a mess of regulatory red tape and significantly increased risk, but also because selling carbon into industry and manufacturing processes provides a way to offset at least some of the mounting costs associated with implementing the technology needed to sequester it and store it.

The liability trap: Injecting CO2 into the earth is a regulatory and technical “black hole” where, perhaps in theory a rock formation 400km off the shore can store 14000 tonnes of CO2 per day without leaking or “burping” it out but can it really in practice? We simply don’t know for sure. Couple this with the fact that companies are being told they must monitor injection sites for decades after they close and, if a leak occurs, responsible companies will be charged $265 per tonne as part of Australia’s new Carbon Tax for failed sequestration and we can add to the pile significant and crippling time and cost implications most companies would struggle to meet.

Gas plus CCS is a massive gamble: the Australian projects are “Carbon Bombs”: massive, centralised facilities where a single technical failure or a single regulatory shift can derail a nation’s entire emissions strategy.

The ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ Card

For decades, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has served as the fossil fuel industry’s ultimate “get out of jail free” card; the miraculous solution that allows for “Business as Usual” while appearing to align with Net Zero and low carbon targets.

By promising that emissions can simply be “vacuumed up” later, oil and gas giants have successfully lobbied for new licences and avoided the immediate, hard work of transitioning to renewables.

However, the 2026 “Australian Collapse” shows that this strategy is finally backfiring.

The greenwashing gap: When companies like Woodside pull projects at the eleventh hour, they reveal that CCS was never a core part of their business model – it was a regulatory shield. Once the rules (like the EPBC Act) demanded actual performance instead of just potential plans, the projects became “too expensive” to maintain.

The failure of intent: As seen with the Gorgon project, even when the technology is built, it often underperforms. Capturing only 1.33 million tonnes against a 4 million-tonne target isn’t just a technical glitch; it’s proof that the industry is not taking its own low-carbon initiatives seriously. They are happy to spend billions on the optics of carbon capture, but they are seemingly unwilling to face the financial reality of making it work.

This reliance on “phantom technology” has led to a lost decade of energy investment. While billions in taxpayer subsidies globally have been funnelled into speculative CCS projects that are now being withdrawn, domestic renewable infrastructure – like the UK’s Anaerobic Digestion sector -has had to fight for every penny.

The backfire is now hitting the fossil fuel industry’s bottom line. Governments are losing patience with “shaky” promises, and the resulting regulatory crackdowns are leaving these companies with “stranded assets”, projects that are too dirty to run and too expensive to fix.

For the UK, the message is clear: we cannot build a national energy strategy on the “Get Out of Jail Free” cards of an industry that is retreating from its own promises.

Real energy security doesn’t come from a technology that is “always ten years away”; it comes from the low-carbon initiatives that are working right now.

The UK’s Shovel-Ready Reality

And, while the UK government has committed over £20 billion to massive “Cluster” CCUS projects like HyNet and Teesside, the Australian experience suggests that putting all our eggs in the “offshore storage” basket is a high-stakes gamble.

If even a global giant like Woodside Energy, with all its technical and financial muscle, is retreating due to regulatory shifts, how resilient is the UK’s own strategy?

The difference between the failing Australian “Carbon Bombs” and a robust UK renewable future lies in three key areas:

1. Usage as the ultimate strategy: The Australian projects are failing because they view Carbon Capture as a disposal problem. They are trying to bury 4 million tonnes of waste in a hole they cannot fully monitor or guarantee. In contrast, the UK’s Anaerobic Digestion (AD) and Energy from Waste (EfW) sectors are pivoting toward Carbon Capture and Usage (CCU). By capturing biogenic CO2 and selling it as a high-purity product for the food, drink, and vertical farming industries, we turn a “liability” into a “revenue stream.” You don’t need decades of “leak monitoring” for a product that has already been consumed by a greenhouse or a beverage manufacturer.

2. Security in distribution: The Woodside and Inpex withdrawals prove that centralised projects can be extremely fragile, as a single change to the EPBC Act or a technical glitch at a subsea injection well can derail a nation’s entire 2030 target. UK renewables – specifically the 150–200 new AD plants required for the April 2026 mandate – represent Distributed Energy Security. By spreading our “gas fields” across hundreds of local sites, we create a network that is immune to the “11th-hour” collapses that are currently paralyzing the Australian energy sector.

3. The Carbon Tax shield: Australia’s $265-per-tonne penalty for failed sequestration is a warning of the “Liability Trap” awaiting companies that rely on storage. For the UK, the “Bin-to-Boiler” model offers an escape. Because AD/EfW focuses on Usage, it bypasses the regulatory minefield of “Sea Dumping” and subsea storage permits altogether.

Some hard lessons to be learned

The collapse of Australia’s most recent CCS projects provides the UK with some hard lessons to be learned. Principally that we cannot rely on what are essentially superficial carbon storage projects to lower national or global emissions, and inject millions – if not billions – of pounds into carbon capture projects alone in the hopes of reaching Net Zero targets and achieving energy security.

Indeed, the UK needs much more than that – a robust strategy of domestic energy generation that sees a wide variety of sources enter the National Grid, all underpinned by a national network of Anaerobic Digestion and EfW plants, utilising Carbon Capture as a commercial resource.

We need to view Carbon Capture as part of the wider, long term strategy, not as an isolated event used to greenwash the gas gap, but as a functional pillar of a truly sovereign, circular energy economy.