SK E&S Collaborates with East Timor on Carbon Capture and Storage... Accelerating Boryeong Blue Hydrogen

Partnership Agreement Signed for Mutual Cooperation Locally on the 17th

SK E&S has taken steps to establish a solid cooperative framework with the government of Timor-Leste to accelerate its global carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) business. This is expected to also speed up CCS-based low-carbon LNG and blue hydrogen projects.

On the 22nd, SK E&S announced that it signed a Mutual Cooperation Partnership (MCP) with the Ministry of Petroleum and Minerals of Timor-Leste to promote timely CCS conversion of the Bayu-Undan depleted gas field and explore opportunities for business expansion.

In this agreement, SK E&S and the Ministry of Petroleum of Timor-Leste agreed to transform the soon-to-be-decommissioned Bayu-Undan gas field into a carbon dioxide storage site, positioning themselves as a ‘first mover’ in the global CCS project.

Considering the relatively limited carbon dioxide storage facilities domestically, this CCS business cooperation with Timor-Leste is expected to significantly enhance the environmental friendliness of future LNG projects and further support SK E&S’s clean blue hydrogen project in Boryeong.

Both parties also agreed to pursue ▲ the establishment of specific institutional support measures such as permits for smooth carbon dioxide import and export between the two countries ▲ joint research to discover additional CCS business expansion opportunities within Timor-Leste ▲ and operation of energy industry education programs through personnel exchanges between the two countries.

The Timor-Leste government plans to enact related legislation by next year to convert the Bayu-Undan depleted gas field into a carbon dioxide storage site. It also intends to provide policy support for transporting carbon dioxide generated from SK E&S’s Boryeong blue hydrogen production facilities to its territory.

The Bayu-Undan gas field will soon be transformed into a storage facility capable of handling 10 million tons of carbon dioxide annually after decommissioning and CCS conversion. SK E&S plans to permanently store carbon dioxide captured not only from natural gas extraction at the Barossa gas field in Australia but also from domestic blue hydrogen production processes in the Bayu-Undan CCS facility.

On the 17th (local time), Francisco da Costa Monteiro, Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources of East Timor (left), and Kim Il-young, Head of Upstream Division at SK E&S, signed a Mutual Cooperation Partnership (MCP) and took a commemorative photo.
[Photo by SK E&S]

CCS is already a commercialized technology that can capture most of the carbon dioxide generated during natural gas production at gas fields as well as during blue hydrogen production processes. Many countries, including those in Europe and the United States, have long been utilizing CCS technology in natural gas production.

The Bayu-Undan depleted gas field has sufficient underground carbon dioxide storage capacity, and with additional facility investments, its carbon dioxide handling capacity could expand to over 10 million tons annually. This will enable active response to the explosively growing CCS demand expected in the Oceania and Asia regions.

The Timor-Leste government has selected the project to convert depleted gas fields into CCS sites as a key national agenda and is providing active support at the state level. For countries like South Korea, which lack sufficient storage sites for CCS, repurposing offshore depleted gas fields as carbon dioxide storage sites can create new added value even after gas field production ends.

Kim Il-young, Head of the Upstream Division at SK E&S, said, "As CCS is gaining attention as a key means for global carbon neutrality, competition among countries to secure carbon dioxide storage sites is intensifying. We will work closely with the Timor-Leste government to timely promote the CCS conversion of the Bayu-Undan depleted gas field and create meaningful outcomes across the entire CCS value chain, including carbon dioxide capture, transport, and storage."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.