Premier urges gas-fired power to curb emissions

West Australian
Tuesday 21/10/2008 Page: 7

Colin Barnett called on other States to use more natural gas for Australia's energy needs as a way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and proposed building a pipeline from the Kimberley to South Australia. The Premier yesterday told a petroleum engineers' conference that Australia's emissions could be cut 5 per cent, and probably more, if the nation set a target to use natural gas for half its energy by 2030 and reduce reliance on coal, which accounts for 85 per cent of electricity production.

"Gas is a far cleaner fuel than coal," he said. "(Modern gas power stations) produce probably a third of the greenhouse emissions of coal." Mr Barnett said a policy of using more natural gas in power generation was a practical and cost-free alternative to the more complex emissions trading scheme being touted by the Rudd Government to start in 2010.

"It's far better to use science and engineering and get more certain outcomes than hope a complex trading scheme is going to reduce emissions," he said. "What the Federal Government is proposing is extraordinarily complicated. It's not understood by the community let alone industry and the biggest loser out of that scheme looks like being WA, because we have energy intensive industries." Mr Barnett said that to achieve more gas use it would be necessary to build a pipeline from the Kimberley to at least the Cooper Basin in central Australia, where existing pipelines would connect it to the East Coast. An energy mandate from State governments would ensure that it was viable for the private sector to build the pipeline without public funding.

Woodside Petroleum chief executive Don Voelte said shipping LNG from WA to "re-gassification" plants on the east coast would likely be more viable. Mr Barnett's proposal would face other hurdles, notably from the Federal Government and Environment Minister Peter Garrett, who on Friday flagged a strategic assessment of the Kimberley region would recommend putting an LNG hub in the Pilbara if the environmental impacts of a hub in the far north were deemed too great.