A few days ago, the Malaysian Parliament passed the Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage Bill 2025. RimbaWatch, an NGO conducting research on climate-related issues, analysed CCUS projects announced in Malaysia, and found that, unsurprisingly, almost all of them support extracting and burning of fossil fuels:
Of the 6 initiatives being proposed in Sarawak, five are linked to fossil fuel expansion, either through enabling sour gas developments or encouraging the development of a gas power plant. These CCUS initiatives are linked to some of the biggest gas discoveries in Malaysia, and the Kasawari and Lang Lebah fields alone hold a combined 16 trillion cubic feet of gas and 20.4 million barrels of oil equivalent of crude reserves.
In Peninsular Malaysia, all four initiatives can be linked to fossil fuel production, either through enabling the development of a high-CO2 field with 4 trillion cubic feet of gas, or being attached to fields with either existing or future production.
Some of the most high-profile CCUS projects in Malaysia, such as Kasawari, will be used to extract so-called “sour gas”. These are fossil gas fields that contain high percentages of hydrogen sulphide (H2S) and carbon dioxide (CO2). These acidic (“sour”) gases can corrode and damage pipelines and equipment, so they need to be removed (“sweetened”) before the hydrocarbons can be used.
After the CO2 is removed, where would it go? The simple (and cheap) answer is: just release (“vent”) them into the atmosphere, where they can hang out with all the other anthropogenic greenhouse gases! Or you can bury them somewhere underground, but that would cost more.
Fossil fuel companies have to capture the CO2 in sour gas if they want to sell hydrocarbons, but they don’t have to store the CO2 like these proposed Malaysia CCUS projects. How nice of them!
Why would they bother to store the captured CO2? I have two guesses:
- CCUS for these fossil fuel expansion projects is a smokescreen. This is classic greenwashing. By touting their flashy, futuristic CCUS, they try to recast themselves from climate villains into climate heroes.
They can make up for the higher cost of storing CO2 by selling carbon credits, charging more for “low carbon natural gas”, or extracting more oil from depleted oil fields (“enhanced oil recovery”). 1
If these companies are going to drill and pump fossil gases anyway, with or without the CO2 storage, then what’s the problem with having CCUS? Wouldn’t it be better to have CCUS, ceteris paribus, than not for these projects?
A basic, well-known problem is, empirically, large-scale CCUS simply doesn’t work. There is a long list of high-profile CCUS project failures, including Chevron’s infamous Gorgon LNG project in Australia which happens to be “sour gas” too.
But the most glaring, fundamental problem is that fossil fuel is fossil fuel is fossil fuel. No matter how much CO2 (or methane, for that matter) can be captured during the production processes and squirrelled away safely, all fossil fuels will eventually end up in the atmosphere as pollution. It’s simple: if something is good for fossil fuels, it’s bad for the climate.
- EOR is the most common use of CCUS, and historically, the financial viability of CCUS projects are inextricably linked to oil prices. Higher oil prices means more profits from EOR, so more likely the CCUS investment will pay for itself. RimbaWatch noted that, while the passed CCUS Bill prohibits using imported CO2 for EOR, it doesn’t say anything about using domestically sourced CO2 for this purpose. If Petronas can pump sour fossil gas, capture the CO2, and use the CO2 to pump more oil, isn’t it nice？ ↩
An Inconvenient Thought 