Wednesday 1/4/2009 Page: 19
A BILLION-DOLLAR operation to handle the most common greenhouse gas could be established in Darwin. The project would require at least one storage and conversion plant to compress carbon dioxide and a pipeline to carry the liquid out to sea for burial. Peter Cook, head of the federally-funded Co-operative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technology, said the conversion plant would have to be a "reasonable size". The initiative would put the Territory at the forefront of the battle against global warming.There are few industrial producers of CO2 in the Territory. One of them is the ConocoPhillips LNG plant at Wickham Point. Inpex plans to build a second gas plant on nearby Blaydin Point. And the resources investment arm of the Japanese government is investigating a long-term proposal to build a gas-to-fuel operation in Darwin or near Alice Springs. An Australian company also foresees the possibility of building a $5 billion gas-to-fuel complex in Central Australia.
LNG is a much cleaner source of energy than coal but it still produces carbon dioxide in production and as a by-product. The Federal Government announced on Sunday that several zones off the Australian coast had been earmarked for carbon capture - burying liquid CO2 below the seabed. One of those zones, known as Petrel, is close to the NT's eastern coast.
Dr Cook said he did not know if ConocoPhillips and Inpex would "share" a conversion plant or install their own giant compressors next to each LNG complex. But he said a shared pipeline would make sense. "Those kind of economies of scale would lower costs," he said. Dr Cook said a conversion plant and pipeline would cost $1 billion. The gas off the north Australian coast is high in carbon dioxide but much of the seabed has the right geological formation for storing the gas as a liquid. Much of the liquid breaks down after reacting with subsea rock and the rest becomes more and more stable as time goes on.
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