The Korea National Oil Corp (KNOC) is accelerating plans to export and store its industrial carbon emissions in Southeast Asia, marking a major step forward in South Korea’s quest to secure overseas carbon storage capacity.

KNOC recently launched an international tender for a reservoir development simulation study as part of an offshore CCS research project. 

The study, conducted in partnership with an unnamed state-owned oil company in Southeast Asia, will evaluate the feasibility of permanently storing carbon dioxide in depleted offshore oil fields. Hyundai Engineering & Construction Co. has been tapped to lead the project.

Overcoming the Domestic Storage Bottleneck

South Korea is home to a massive concentration of heavy, hard-to-abate industries, including steel, petrochemicals, oil refining, and cement. While the country has made strides in carbon capture technology, actual domestic deployment has lagged. 

The primary roadblock is that South Korea simply lacks the domestic geological formations needed to safely and permanently store millions of tonnes of captured CO2​ underground.

To bypass this bottleneck, Seoul is actively pursuing a cross-border CCS strategy. Southeast Asia represents an ideal partner for this model. 

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Decades of intensive oil and gas production in the region have left behind a vast network of depleted reservoirs and well-mapped offshore geological formations that are highly suitable for large-scale carbon storage.

The newly launched study will focus on assessing the storage capacity of two specific depleted oil and gas fields. It will also run advanced carbon dioxide injection simulations to evaluate the long-term viability, integrity, and safety of the storage sites before any physical injection begins.

If successful, the project could pave the way for a highly replicable cross-border carbon pipeline, helping South Korean industrial giants meet their climate targets by leveraging geological assets thousands of miles away.

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