Chevron’s Gorgon carbon capture and storage facility in Australia is underperforming after sequestering the least amount of carbon annually in the past year since it started operating six years ago.

The data, released in Chevron’s annual performance review of the project, shows that the facility captured only 1.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide during the 2024-2025 fiscal year, a bit less than half of what it stored when it first opened in 2019. It amounts to just 25% of the CO2 that Chevron removed from its nearby associated gas fields, writes Renew Economy.

The underperformance is an ongoing trend for the project. Until this most recent year, the 2023-2024 fiscal year had shown the lowest amount of carbon stored in the project’s history, just 30% of the carbon removed from nearby gas fields, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) reported at the time.

The finding renews criticisms raised by many climate advocates about carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies–that the technology is ineffective, over-expensive, and greenwashes oil and gas production while distracting from solutions that cut emissions by halting fossil fuel use. IEEFA notes that falling injection rates at Gorgon effectively increase the cost of every tonne that it does manage to store, weakening the overall economic case for the project.

Proponents, however, say CCS is still a necessary tool to reduce carbon emissions. Chevron itself argues that Gorgon’s poor performance is site specific, resulting from complications of managing pressure levels in the underground reservoir. According to The Guardian, a spokesperson for the fossil fuel company stated that Chevron is working on the problem and will be able to increase injection rates when it is solved.

“While we have continued to store as much carbon dioxide as we safely can during this period, carbon dioxide injection rates have decreased,” the spokesperson said. “Once project works are complete, we will continue our condition-based approach to increase injection rates over time.”

But Gorgon is not the only CCS project to underperform. A 2022 report by IEEFA found that 10 of the world’s 13 “flagship, large-scale” CCS projects had fallen short of expectation, and The Energy Mix previously reported that the CCS industry was not confident the technology could live up to expectations.

In another analysis released last fall, the London Register of Subsurface CO₂ Storage, Imperial College London found that 383 million tonnes of carbon dioxide have been stored underground since 1996. Martin Jagger, an energy consultant who was not involved in the analysis, told The Guardian  the industry’s overall performance proves the technology can work technically and safely. But proponents need to be honest that it is a marginal technology that “still barely registers on the climate scoreboard,” he added.