Woodside and Rio Tinto are among the country’s biggest industrial emitters due to the vast carbon footprints of Woodside’s gas production assets in Victoria and Western Australia, and Rio Tinto’s Queensland alumina refineries and aluminium smelters.

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Both companies have been forced to adhere to deeper emission-reduction targets from this year under the Albanese government’s toughening of the “safeguard mechanism” climate policy, while also facing sustained pressure from shareholders to slash emissions and expand into cleaner products.

Earlier this year, Woodside, the largest Australian gas company, was rocked by a historic investor uprising over its approach to climate change, when 58 per cent of its shareholders rejected its decarbonisation strategies as inadequate.

Several large investors in Australia, Europe and Britain publicly condemned Woodside’s climate targets as too weak, and said they had become increasingly concerned about the risks involved in the company’s plans to develop new fossil fuel production projects at a time of accelerating international efforts to restrain rising global temperatures.

The Perth-based oil and gas giant has set a target to greenlight investments in lower-carbon products or carbon capture technologies that could abate five million tonnes of emissions a year by 2030. The move was welcomed by some investors as a positive step, but there are concerns that projects may be difficult to commercialise at the scale required.

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Woodside vice president of energy solutions Jason Crusan said biological solutions could contribute to the company’s efforts to decarbonise.

“We have set very clear emissions reduction targets, and we believe that biological solutions could be an important part of the solutions to help us achieve our emissions reductions,” he said.

Nick Gurieff, Rio Tinto’s principal adviser on mine closure research and development, said finding better ways to recover critical minerals and remediate the byproducts from mining and processing activities was a key objective for the business.

“Our partnership with the University of Queensland in developing biological solutions to support these objectives is an important part of our investment in the future of mine closure,” he said.

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