Friday 28/9/2007 Page: 18
A LEADING scientist fears the Federal Government's clean energy target will be dominated by unproven clean coal technology. Australian Academy of Science president Kurt Lambeck said the technology is 20 years away, and even then, would have limitations in curbing carbon emissions. Prime Minister John Howard on Sunday unveiled a clean energy target of about 15 per cent of power generation by 2020. Professor Lambeck, a geophysicist at Australian National University, who has studied sea level change, disagreed with including both renewable energy and purported low emission technologies in the target."I think it's a great mistake to bundle those two things together because most of the targets, I suspect, will be addressed through the clean coal, rather than resulting in the development of renewables that are truly clean," he told the National Press Club in Canberra. Both the government and federal Labor support the development of clean coal technology as a way of tackling climate change while protecting the coal industry.
"There's a lot of talk about clean coal - it could be construed as an oxymoron," Prof Lambeck said. "The technological solutions that are being looked at are probably 20 years away before they can be really employed on the large scale. "The sequestration has its limitations, the capture of the CO2 has limitations, and it's never totally clean, anyway." He encouraged the take-up of solar and wind technologies. "I can't understand why the wind energy has such difficulty getting off the ground in Australia, when you see what's happening in Northern Europe, for example."
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