Burying coal fumes a 'smokescreen'

Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday 6/5/2008 Page: 7

CARBON capture and storage technology, which is central to the Federal Government's climate change strategy, is a mirage that is damaging efforts to develop renewable energy, a global report funded by Greenpeace has found. The report was criticised yesterday by the resources industry and the mining union, which are relying on the technology to cut down emissions from coalburning power stations. The debate surrounding Carbon Capture and Storage is intensifying as the resources industry attempts to bargain for concessions while the Federal Government ponders the design of an Emissions Trading Scheme.

Greenpeace, and many other environment groups, argue that the process cannot deliver emissions cuts in time to slow down human-created global warming, and that public investment in the experimental technology diverts resources from other ways of reducing emissions, such as energy efficiency, solar, wind and wave power. "It's a smokescreen that allows the fossil fuel industry to continue business as usual, and there isn't time to wait for 20 years to find out if the technology works," said Steve Campbell, Greenpeace's Australian campaign director.

The report, False Hope, questions the feasibility, cost and safety of CCS, which will endeavour to stop emissions by capturing carbon dioxide at power plants, piping it to suitable areas and injecting it underground. It points out that the power needed to undertake CCS at one coal-fired power station can absorb up to a third of the energy generated by that plant, and accuses industry of using the possibility of the technology being widely adopted as a justification for building more fossil fuel driven power plants.

The findings are endorsed by the Australian Greens, but the Government is already investing heavily in the technology, in partnership with the coal industry and electricity generators. "It is simplistic to suggest clean coal and renewable energy technologies are competing alternatives," the Minister for Resources and Energy, Martin Ferguson, said in a statement. "They are complementary, and the Government is investing heavily in both.

Eighty-three per cent of Australia's electricity is generated from coal. No serious response to climate change can ignore coal." Last month Mr Ferguson launched an experiment near Otway in Victoria, where carbon will be buried in a largely empty gas reservoir.

The national president of the mining and energy union, Tony Maher, said the Greenpeace report was unrealistic, because elements of the technology were already in use around the world, and many nations would be relying on coal and gas for their electricity needs for several decades. The environment group WWF Australia is supporting the trials on condition they show results within five years. fossil fuel combustion accounts for nearly half of Australia's total greenhouse emissions.