Go Greener, Australia

One of the major items on our government’s list of “Things to Do to Help the Environment” is paying for more carbon sequestration experiments. In the recent budget, they allocated $500 million towards research into ‘clean’ coal. But what is it, exactly?

Carbon sequestration is also known as geosequestration or carbon capture and storage (I prefer the last name, because it’s easier to spell!). The idea is to figure out how to capture the carbon being emitted, transform it into a liquid or gas which can be easily stored, then find a suitable underground area to put it in, where it will hopefully stay without harming the environment around it. You can see how they’re planning on doing it in this pdf file on Carbon Capture from CO2CRC, the company leading the research in Australia.

Currently they’re working on an experimental sequestration project in the Otway basin in Victoria. This will pump 100,000 tonnes of naturally-occurring carbon dioxide into a natural reservoir 2km underground, to see if it stays there once they put it there. Unfortunately, even if this project goes exactly to plan, it would be at least 5 to 10 years before it would be available commercially (opponents say it might be as long as 20 years). And as reported in the Age, it can’t even be retro-fitted to our older power stations like Hazelwood.

Then we face the problem of where we’re going to store this stuff. At the moment, over 80% of Australia’s electricity comes from coal-fired power plants. With over 200 million tonnes of carbon dioxide produced annually, that’s a lot of liquid or gas to find a new home for. CO2CRC has a pdf map of possible sites in Australia but it’s unlikely that all of them will be suitable. Another research project in Kwinana has been cancelled because the geological formations were found to have gas ‘chimneys’ that would allow the gas to escape.

Other demonstration projects have been cancelled recently in Norway and the UK, as they were considered too expensive. A US project has had it’s government funding cancelled as well due to cost blow-outs.

It makes you wonder why we’re spending half our money for eco-friendly energy on carbon capture and storage. It seems like a slow, expensive way to support a dying industry. I’d prefer to see all the research money go to renewables research, which only got the same $500 million to divide among individual technologies like solar, wind and geothermal.

Obviously the coal companies would like to get rid of the carbon-dioxide they put out instead of putting it into our atmosphere, since that would let them carry on with business as usual. But the coal industry is made up of enormous companies posting huge profits: if they want to stay the preferred energy source, isn’t it up to them to meet our new, cleaner standards? Why are we paying for their research?

Carbon storage may be necessary though: even if we stop getting our energy from coal-fired power plants relatively soon, we may still need to scrub the existing carbon emissions out of the atmosphere. If so, we’ll need a safe place to put them, and I haven’t heard any better ideas yet