The Government’s proposal for a “Australian Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute” is either a stunt or they haven’t done their homework properly.
There’s already an international carbon capture body just like the one proposed by Kevin Rudd and Martin Ferguson on Friday. The Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum was established by the Bush Administration in 2003, as part of its attempt to suggest if there was such a thing as climate change — and of course there wasn’t — it should be dealt with via new energy technologies that meant we didn’t have to do anything about our patterns of consumption or sources of energy.
The Howard Government signed up to it, of course. So did a number of major coal producers, as well as the Indians, the Chinese and the Europeans.
The CSLF is aimed at coordinating carbon capture research, bringing industry and governments together, identifying obstacles such as intellectual property issues, promoting “technical, political, and regulatory environments” for carbon capture, and addressing public perceptions.
The Prime Minister’s initiative will “facilitate” carbon capture projects, coordinate research, address regulatory and legislative questions, and disseminate information about carbon capture.
The biggest difference is that the Americans run the CSLF, but Rudd and Ferguson want their version based in Australia.
The coal industry welcomed the announcement on Friday, having been summoned to Canberra for it. But industry insiders were dismissive of it, although no one would bag it publicly.
It’s clear that the Government is dead keen on carbon capture. It’s the perfect mechanism to address climate change without upsetting either resources companies or the CFMEU. The Government will have enough difficulties with unions over its new IR laws and the retention of the ABCC until 2010. Getting unions offside on climate change starts to look like a war on two fronts.
The problem with carbon capture isn’t that the technology hasn’t been developed properly and we don’t know if it works on an economic scale or not. If you place it on a spectrum of available technologies, it’s down toward the back end along with geothermal and tidal power. Other technologies like solar, nuclear and wind are far more advanced, although nuclear is prohibitively expensive and takes forever to get going.
If we’d started investing in carbon capture research in the 1990s, it might be a lot closer to viability. But we’ve waited so long to pull our finger out and start looking at our reliance on carbon-based energy that we don’t have time to develop new technologies from scratch.
The dead giveaway in all this is who is spruiking this carbon capture investment. The US Department of Energy provides the secretariat for the CSLF. Most of the signatories to the CSLF charter were ministers for energy or resources, including our own Ian MacFarlane. This new Australian version is being pushed by Martin Ferguson and the Department of Resources and Energy. It’s the climate change holdouts in each country that are pushing carbon capture in the hope they can stave off the switch to renewables.
We have to be positive about this, but it is so hard to see anything positive in this “me-tooism” stuff, and Mr Keane is right to be pessimistic. There has been so much work done on carbon sequestration over the last 20 years, but there is so little positive outcome thus far – especially economically feasible commercial progress. Our half a billion will add precious little to the progress made so far.
One becomes more cynical when commentators highlight this latest announcement as a sop to the unions and the coal companies.
These funds set up by Swan in the MAy budget were supposed to be anti-inflation reserves to establish infrastructure, but this so-called AGCCSI will simply burn the money in endless research that will do anything but stifle inflation. The same could perhaps be said for throwing money at geothermal solar and nuclear, but at least all of these are feasible/possible – just costly and slow.
Come on Tourist08 and Miss Penny – let’ s have some meaningful progress -somewhere, somehow.
We’re going absolutely nowhere with the River Murray problem, nowhere sensible with the emissions issue, and now this!! And of course Big Pete hates the idea of using coal to manufacture petroleum products – also, it seems, a feasible option to utilise some of our coal resources. He even sang about that way back then. Oh well….nothing wrong with singing.
Bernard Keane poses a somewhat surprising if disingenuous possibility in his opening sentence. Rudd is already renown in media circles for his penchant of making grand statements without following them up with coherent plan about how they will be achieved. Why is this any different?
‘Clean-Coal Debut in Germany – A new coal plant is the first to capture and store carbon dioxide’
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/21397/
Friday, September 19, 2008
I hope someone checks this out before Rudd commits $100mil of our tax money trying to re-invent it.
Perhaps someone should alerts him to its existence before he proposes his plan, during his current visit to the US, for Australia to invent this technology……./Chris
“Australian Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute”
Isn’t that a fancypants word for graveyard…plenty of those around ?
There is only one proven way to capture carbon from the atmosphere – photosynthesis – and the best way to store this captured carbon is as Soil Carbon. Internationally recognised soil scientists (IPCC contributing and lead authors no less) have estimated that, by changing management on Australia’s 448 million hectares of seasonally dry grazing lands, we could remove over 900 MILLION tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year for the next 20 plus years. To put this into perspective this is more than our current TOTAL emissions.
We CAN do something about the climate crisis – and boost eco-system resilience, promote rural industry self-reliance, and help heal Australia’s ailing river systems – look at http://www.soilcarbon.com.au to see how.