The short version: Santos runs one of the biggest carbon capture projects on the planet in a paddock outside Innamincka, has spent the better part of a decade trying to get a gas field in northern New South Wales into production, and keeps turning up in every conversation about why the east coast might run short of gas later this decade. None of those three things are unrelated, and none of them are simple.
I’ve been writing about Cooper Basin gas on and off since before most readers of this had heard of Moomba as anything other than a pipeline junction on a map. The arguments haven’t changed much. What’s changed is that Santos now has a live carbon capture and storage project actually injecting CO2 into the ground there, which is more than most companies making CCS promises can say.
Moomba’s carbon workaround #
Moomba CCS is the flagship. Santos operates the project as part of the Cooper Basin joint venture with Beach Energy, and the pitch has always been straightforward: reuse depleted gas reservoirs that have held hydrocarbons in place for tens of millions of years, and use them instead to store the carbon dioxide stripped out of Cooper Basin gas processing. First injection began in 2024, and Santos’s own target, stated repeatedly in its ASX filings, is to reach around 1.7 million tonnes of CO2 stored per year at full capacity, ramping up over several years rather than arriving there on day one.
That’s a genuinely large number by global CCS standards — bigger than most of the handful of comparable projects running anywhere in the world. It also sits at the centre of the Safeguard Mechanism conversation we’ve covered before on this site: Moomba’s own processing emissions are covered by the Safeguard Mechanism’s baselines, and the CCS project is Santos’s primary tool for staying under them without buying abatement elsewhere. Whether the injected volumes verify out at the rate Santos projects is a question for the Clean Energy Regulator’s monitoring over the next few years, not something anyone can bank yet. Reservoir behaviour over decades is not a spreadsheet exercise, and I’d want another two or three years of injection data before calling it settled either way. Fair to say the industry is watching Moomba more closely than Santos’s own investor presentations always let on.
Narrabri and the long fight over the Pilliga #
If Moomba is Santos playing defence on emissions, Narrabri is Santos playing offence on supply — and it has taken considerably longer than anyone at head office in Adelaide would have liked.
The Narrabri Gas Project, in the Pilliga forest region of northern NSW, has approvals stretching back to the NSW Independent Planning Commission’s 2020 decision and subsequent federal sign-off, both of which came with conditions tying the gas to the domestic east coast market rather than export. It has also drawn sustained opposition from the Gomeroi people, whose native title claim over the area led to a long-running dispute before the National Native Title Tribunal and the Federal Court over the granting of petroleum production leases. Santos has maintained the project meets its legal obligations; Gomeroi objectors have argued the opposite through the courts. Both things can be true of a contested planning process at once, and it’s not this column’s job to referee it.
What matters for the gas market is timing. Santos’s own guidance on first gas from Narrabri has slipped more than once over the life of the project, and as things stand the field still isn’t producing. When it does come on, Santos and the NSW government have both pointed to it as a way of easing the state’s reliance on gas piped up from Victoria and South Australia. Whether the field arrives in time to matter for the shortfall years AEMO keeps flagging is genuinely an open question, not a rhetorical one.
The shortfall argument, again #
Which brings us to the bit everyone actually argues about at conferences: does the east coast have enough gas, and if not, whose fault is that?
AEMO’s Gas Statement of Opportunities has for several years now flagged the risk of supply gaps in southern states from the late 2020s, driven by declining production from Bass Strait and Cooper Basin fields that are simply getting old, alongside seasonal peak-day risk in cold snaps. The ACCC’s ongoing gas inquiry reports have made a related but distinct point: that the physical gas is often available somewhere on the east coast, but getting it to where it’s needed, and at a price retailers and manufacturers can live with, is the harder problem. Both bodies have been consistent enough on this that it’s worth treating as the baseline, not a talking point from either side of the reservation debate.
Santos sits inside both arguments because it produces domestic gas from the Cooper Basin and Narrabri (eventually), and because it also owns a stake in GLNG, the export terminal at Gladstone that draws gas from Queensland’s Surat and Bowen basins. Critics of the export LNG model, including manufacturing groups that have lobbied federal and state governments for years, argue plants like GLNG helped link the east coast domestic price to international LNG benchmarks in the first place, pulling gas towards the higher-value export market. Santos’s position, consistent across its public statements, is that GLNG has actually been a net importer of third-party gas at times to meet its own contracts, and that blaming the exporters oversimplifies a market with genuine underlying supply decline. Both claims can be checked against AEMO’s published gas market data, and I’d encourage readers to do exactly that rather than take either side’s framing at face value.
Where the export gas actually goes #
It’s worth being blunt about scale here, because the debate often loses the units. The three Gladstone LNG plants combined, Santos’s GLNG among them, contract a considerably larger share of Queensland gas production than the domestic east coast market consumes in a year. That’s not a scandal, it’s the deal Queensland and the Commonwealth signed up to when the projects got approved more than a decade ago, largely to unlock Queensland’s coal seam gas reserves for a paying export market. But it does mean the domestic supply conversation on the east coast is, in practice, a conversation about how much of that export-committed gas gets released back into the local market during tight periods, whether through the Australian Domestic Gas Security Mechanism or through commercial deals. Santos, like its peers, has occasionally redirected uncontracted cargoes domestically during shortfalls — a fact its own market updates note when it happens, though it’s not something that occurs on a predictable schedule.
Who Santos actually is right now #
Corporately, Santos had a fairly loud 2025. The company spent much of the year fielding takeover interest, first in the shape of merger talks with Woodside Energy over an all-scrip combination, and separately from a consortium reportedly linked to Abu Dhabi’s ADNOC investment arm. Neither approach resulted in a completed transaction, and as of now Santos remains an independently listed company on the ASX under chief executive Kevin Gallagher, headquartered in Adelaide with its Cooper Basin and Moomba operations run out of South Australia’s north-east, PNG LNG interests in Papua New Guinea, and a growing position in Alaska’s North Slope through the Pikka project. It’s a genuinely odd portfolio for an Australian gas company — outback South Australia and the Arctic Circle under one ASX code — and it tells you something about how far Santos has diversified away from being purely an east coast domestic supplier.
The bit that doesn’t fit neatly #
Here’s my one editorial judgement on all this, for what it’s worth: I think the domestic gas shortfall debate spends too much energy arguing about Narrabri specifically and not enough about the structural decline curve of Bass Strait and the ageing Cooper Basin fields that supply most of the actual molecules right now. Narrabri, even fully ramped, was never going to solve the southern states’ supply problem on its own, and treating it as the swing factor lets everyone avoid the harder conversation about demand, storage, and pipeline capacity that AEMO’s own reporting keeps pointing to. That’s not a defence of Santos’s approvals process, which the Gomeroi objections make clear remains genuinely contested. It’s just that the maths on Narrabri’s likely volumes has never supported the size of the argument around it.
None of this is going away soon. Moomba’s injection numbers will get more scrutiny as the Clean Energy Regulator’s data accumulates, Narrabri will keep testing whether NSW’s domestic gas conditions hold up once (if) gas actually flows, and the wholesale price swings we’ve covered before on this site will keep being driven, in no small part, by exactly the kind of gas supply tightness Santos sits in the middle of. I’ll be watching Moomba’s verified storage figures most closely — that’s the one number in this whole story that either holds up under an actual audit or it doesn’t. Everything else is argument.
— Tom Fitzgerald, Baseload & Fuels Correspondent
Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash