{"id":791012,"date":"2026-07-10T08:50:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T08:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/791012\/"},"modified":"2026-07-10T08:50:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T08:50:12","slug":"victorian-government-announces-plans-for-co2-battery-in-gippsland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/791012\/","title":{"rendered":"Victorian government announces plans for CO2 battery in Gippsland"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Victorian government has unveiled a plan to build an Australian-first compressed CO2 battery storage system in the heart of the state’s coal country.<\/p>\n

The 20-megawatt closed-loop battery, which will be powered by compressed carbon dioxide from Gippsland’s Longford gas plant, will be built adjacent to the old Hazelwood power station, the brown coal-fired electricity plant that powered the state for decades.<\/p>\n

The battery will have three times the energy storage capacity of a large scale lithium-ion battery and store renewable energy produced during the day to be used in the grid overnight.<\/p>\n

Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio said the battery would be part of a 143-hectare renewable energy hub aimed at reducing power prices.<\/p>\n

\"Dark-haired<\/p>\n

Tom McIntosh and Lily Di’Ambrosio at the site of a future renewables hub at Hazelwood. (ABC Gippsland: Madeleine Stuchbery)<\/p>\n

“This ia a very important next step in the build-out of the technologies that the SEC is renowned for, and will deliver on behalf of the Victorian people, especially here in the Gippsland region near Morwell,” she said.<\/p>\n

SEC is a government-owned renewable energy company.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The government is yet to reveal a timeline for the project, but it is understood consultation work will take place in the coming years.<\/p>\n

Ms D’Ambrosio said the battery was the first of a number of projects slated for the eastern Victorian site and that construction would support 66 jobs.<\/p>\n

“We know that we’re going to need, in Victoria, more long-duration storage technologies to support the transition to 95 per cent renewable electricity by 2035,” she said.<\/p>\n

How does an air compression battery work?<\/p>\n

SEC acting executive head of assets Lane Crockett said the battery would take carbon dioxide at low pressure and compress it into liquid form.<\/p>\n

“Then that energy is basically stored as a liquid, and it can be expanded when you need the energy,” he said.<\/p>\n

“The beauty of carbon dioxide as a gas is it’s nonflammable, it’s non-toxic, and the gas is such that you are able to store it without having to make it colder to make it into a liquid.”<\/p>\n

The battery’s reserve of carbon dioxide, which will be provided by the Longford gas plant, will only need to be filled once for the 30-year life of the battery.<\/p>\n

Mr Crockett said the project would involve a mix of offshore and domestic construction.<\/p>\n

The state government said the works were part of a $4.6 billion investment into jobs in the Latrobe-Gippsland region.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Victorian government has unveiled a plan to build an Australian-first compressed CO2 battery storage system in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":791013,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[64,63,99,372724,372720,29203,372722,165480,372721,372723],"class_list":["post-791012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-carbon-dioxide-battery","tag-compressed-carbon-dioxide","tag-hazelwood","tag-lane-crockett","tag-lily-dambrosio","tag-longford-gas-plant","tag-morwell-battery-announced"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=791012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791012\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/791013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}