It’s rare that Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest — the richest and most influential mining magnate in the country — lets fly at other sectors of the extractive industry, but he didn’t mince words about the fossil fuel sector in his comments to The Australian Financial Review published yesterday to the rage of fossil fuel interests.
Santos and Woodside were particular targets. “Santos is about to kick off one of the most polluting projects in the world. It needs to be called for what it is. It is an atrocious project, an atrocious project,” Forrest said, before going on to point out “the fossil fuel industry’s cosiness with governments will lead to a perpetuation of that great lie ‘clean coal’ with its next sister great lie ‘clean hydrogen’.”
It’s almost as if Forrest has been reading Crikey, where we’ve been pointing out how fossil fuel companies skew public policy and the lie of clean coal for years.
The fossil fuel companies, gathered in Perth for a conference, hit back at Forrest. Santos CEO Kevin Gallagher claimed that “as far as the Barossa project is concerned we are very proud of the efforts we have made [to limit emissions] … ”
That response is worth considering given the facts about the Barossa field north of Darwin, which Santos is developing in order to keep its ageing Darwin LNG plant operating when gas from the Timor-Leste Bayu-Undan field runs out. It turns out that Forrest is exactly correct about Barossa: it will be one the most polluting gas fields in the world.
Santos admitted as much in documents lodged on its behalf by Conocco-Phillips in 2018. “The native CO2 content of the reservoir gas for the project is a higher proportion when compared to other offshore oil and gas developments in the region,” the documents note.
In fact, at 16-20%, Barossa is twice as carbon-intensive as some other gas fields in the region. It is so carbon-intensive the Darwin LNG plant can’t handle it: some CO2 will need “to be removed offshore prior to delivery into the gas export pipeline to a level that is compatible with the existing … facilities.” That means most of the CO2 will need to be “flared” off on the “Floating Production Storage and Offloading” facility offshore.
This means Barossa will have two massive sources of CO2 emissions: its offshore facility to get the gas into a fit state to be processed at the Darwin LNG facility, then the usual emissions from the latter as the gas is processed into LNG. LNG economist and engineer John Robert did the sums in a paper for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. The offshore processing would, on Santos’ own figures, generate 3.38 million tonnes of CO2 per annum, while the Darwin LNG facility produces 2.05 MtCO2pa, so Barossa will generate 5.4 MtCO2pa.
That’s all for an annual output of 3.7 million tonnes of LNG. As Robert noted, “this makes the Barossa to Darwin project ‘a CO2 emissions factory with an LNG by-product'”.
The Barossa field, he shows, will be 9-18 times more polluting than gas fields in the Middle East, Africa and the Atlantic.
Despite Gallagher peddling carbon capture and storage, Barossa will be entirely free of the deployment of any such technology — understandably given it isn’t commercially viable. Chevron’s attempt to use CCS at its Gorgon facility has been an expensive debacle.
Santos claims the project will generate “600 jobs throughout the construction phase and secure 350 jobs for the next 20 years of production at the Darwin LNG facility”. That amounts to around 5600 tonnes of CO2 for each job, every year, for 20 years … if we pretend the construction jobs are permanent.
Resources minister Keith Pitt lavished praise on Santos in March, describing Barossa as “a tremendous show of confidence in the long-term future of Australia’s resource sector”. Santos has handed over $1.8 million in donations to the Coalition in the last 20 years.
Cosiness indeed.
Barossa is astounding. Fossil fuel companies and the government talk endlessly about the illusory benefits of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) but here is the exact oppposite, Carbon (Dioxide) Extraction and Release. Carbon dioxide that is currently sealed undergound where it can do no harm, which is the claimed objective of CCS, is going to pumped out of the ground and released into the atmosphere, once it has been stripped of some of the other carbon-containing chemicals in there; those chemicals will in due course be burned to make more carbon dioxide, although inevitably some methane and so on will also be released into the atmosphere, to do far more harm than the equivalent volume of carbon dioxide. So on the one hand we have the mythical CCS, which like jam for tea is always expected tomorrow, and on the other we have the reality of its mirror image, a diabolical concerted effort to accelerate global warming and the irreversible catastrophe that comes with it.
Santos CEO is proud of reducing the possible emissions. However no amount of reduction can ever forgive them for the emissions they continue to make. We must not be fobbed off by would-be emitters promising to make token “reductions”. That is now a weasel word that should ring our alarm bells. The time is past for reductions of any size short of total eradication. All actions and promises for action should contain the word “zero”.
A starting point to crikey readers might be to read “Greenwash – Big Brands and Carbon Scams” by Guy Pearse, published 2012. Eye opener, but also very depressing on how corporations bamboozle the public.
It seems to me that as long as we are mainly concerned with consumerism, nothing will change. Politicians worldwide see jobs, political power (via donations), maybe laws made to show “they” care, but in reality laws have no teeth, or no agency to follow through. Popularity and election are the main goal. The pollution following any industry is downplayed constantly by most politicians.
And the public is too “proper” or apathetic to organise itself into a relevant fighting force – eg, demonstrations, picketing, writing to all politicians constantly to keep the issue alive. We’d rather do the gardening, or travel around the country enjoying Australia’s bounty.
The school children are the only hope I have to make some kind of impact with regards to climate change. We had “strike 4 climate”, there is Greta. Every other person on the planet is too bogged down in their own circumstances to even think of climate change, until the crops fail and grass and water become scarce as gold.
it is by ‘constantly keeping the issue alive” is how progress is made. Look at the example of the SriLankan family who have lost every court case to date still being allowed to stay here and more and more people supporting them – especially politicians who can smell an election sympathy vote in their electorates in the near future
Sadistic instinct and religious of the poor and disadvantaged will overcome any mild compassion or sympathy felt at the top of this government.
So Santos has donated an average of $90k per year over 20 years to the LNP? Goes to show buying favour with the Government comes at bargain basement prices in Australia. I’m sure the CEO puts more on the company Black Amex card every year for wine (tax deductible, of course).
All very well for Forrest to criticise fossil fuels, which is valid, but the timing when he could have been doing this decades ago?