Concrete an opportunity for Australia to make a difference on carbon and climate

Cement manufacturing is one of the most carbon-intensive industries. Picture: Luke Marsden.

The burst of shouting and arm-waving over climate change prompted by the NSW and Queensland bushfires has resulted in some pretty unedifying politics. Various Coalition politicians are employing tactics from the NRA’s mass-shooting playbook: “Now is not the right time to talk about carbon control”.

It’s not the right time because when everyone is emotional over the evidence of policy failure you might lose the argument, so best to wait till they’re emotional about something else.

And with the evidence now conclusive that the climate is changing, the fallback denial argument is that with only 1.1 per cent of global emissions, there’s nothing Australia could have done that would have prevented the bushfires or other manifestations of global warming.

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Which is quite true, of course, except that this is just the litterer’s abject defence: what’s the problem officer? It’s just one little coffee cup.

So what can/should Australia actually do now that might be both useful and doable?

Well, we can forget about an emissions trading scheme for a long time, not to mention – dread phrase – a carbon tax. Neither major party has that as part of its policy. The Coalition will never do it, and while the ALP talks a big game, even the Climate Action Plan that did not mention emissions trading has disappeared from the ALP website awaiting, … something else.

And if Labor ever does propose another Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme or Clean Energy Act, they look like being out of office until the Tasman Sea is lapping at Parliament House in Canberra so it doesn’t matter.

Energy shift

And in any case, the electricity market, which is the main target of emissions trading, is pretty much taken care of.

According to the latest Energy Dynamics report from the Australian Energy Market Operator, negative pricing events due to solar and wind generation hit record levels in the September quarter and as I wrote here last month, the huge pipeline of renewable energy projects are starting to overwhelm the grid, to the point where COAG is considering hydrogen factories to use it up. Renewable energy targets, almost whatever they are, will be met easily.

Recent bushfires have ramped up the rhetoric in the climate debate. Picture: AAP

And last week the Australian Energy Market Commission issued a report headed: “How digitalisation is changing the NEM” (National Electricity Market). The press release from AEMC chairman John Pierce called it “e-Baying Australia’s energy market”.

He was talking about how the system is becoming two-way, with consumers selling power back into the grid, partly by having appliances to come at the right times (ie when the sun is shining) but mostly because of rooftop solar. “We need to get a better handle on the virtual power plants which households are creating through solar PV and local storage. Until now, we have been limited by technology, but digitalisation has progressed to the point where it is time to consider a completely new approach.”

An actual plan

So what, exactly, should be written on placards in the marches for action on climate change, apart from vague abuse?

Well there is far more to tackling climate change than electricity and transport. The problem of steel and concrete is much more difficult, and arguably more important.

If global warming is to be kept below 1.5 degrees, carbon emissions must be reduced to zero by 2050. Transport and electricity are relatively easy, and well underway, even in air transport apparently: Qantas has said it can be zero net emissions by 2050.

Heavy industries, especially steel and concrete, are the big problems. Producing by-product carbon dioxide is fundamental to the production of both of those materials and they are responsible for about 10 per cent of all global emissions.

As an essay in New Scientist last week said of steel and concrete: “ … if we want to reach net-zero carbon targets, we can no longer ignore them”.

The government could assist the global effort to reduce or eliminate the emissions from steel and concrete by commissioning, and funding, a major CSIRO research project into the problem.

The process for doing it with steel is known already – that is, using hydrogen to remove the oxygen from iron ore instead of coking coal – and a lot of work on that is underway. Also steel recycling could be increased.

Concrete is much more difficult, in fact Julian Allwood, lead author on the subject for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, bluntly says: “There are no options to decarbonise cement”.

However there is research going on into possible substitutes for cement in concrete. According to the New Scientist scientists are looking at fly ash (the by-product of coal power stations) steel blast furnace slag, and another steel by-product called calcium silicate slag. Obviously these will be limited if the steelmaking process changes.

And then there’s carbon capture, with CO2 being used as a feedstock for something else, such as plastic or diesel fuel.

All of this is going to require a lot of research. There is a big effort going on around the world; the Australian Government could achieve some relatively easy greenie points by joining it, and given the quality of Australian science, could even make a difference.

Alan Kohler is Editor in Chief of InvestSMART.com.au