Carbon catchers launch coal's brightest hope

Age
Monday 31/3/2008 Page: 2

AUSTRALIA will take a major step into a carbon-constrained world this week when a world scale carbon dioxide sequestration plant is commissioned in Victoria. Carbon captured from polluting coal-fired power plants and then stored underground is the hope for the future of coal as a power source. The Government's climate change adviser, Professor Ross Garnaut, singled out Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) in an interim report last week, saying revenue from a carbon trading scheme could be used to fund the new technology.

While there are three commercial carbon storage plants operating in the world - Weyburn in Canada, Sleipner in Norway and In Salah in Algeria - other test efforts have been small, only storing a few thousand tonnes of carbon dioxide. The new Victorian project, at Nirranda near Warrnambool in the Otway Basin, will eventually store 100,000 tonnes, enabling the injection, storage and surface behaviour of the stored carbon dioxide to be monitored for future commercial application and linkage to carbon capture at power plants.

The $40 million pilot scheme is receiving keen government, business and foreign attention. Martin Ferguson, the federal Minister for Resources and Energy, and his Victorian counterpart Peter Batchelor will be at the formal commissioning on Wednesday. The project has also received support from New Zealand, Canada and the US. Big miners and petroleum companies have joined the Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies (CO2CRC) to operate the Otway Basin project. They include BHP Billiton, Xstrata, Woodside, AngloCoal, Rio Tinto Solid Energy, BP, Chevron and Shell.

CO2CRC chief executive Peter Cook said the commercial scale project - the world's largest geosequestration research effort - would use gas piped from a nearby field to inject into the depleted Nirranda field and stored two kilometres below the surface. Sound waves bounced off rocks would reveal the behaviour of the stored carbon dioxide. "Once we have about 10,000 tonnes stored in a month or two we will have the first results," said Dr Cook.