Much-touted carbon capture and storage must deliver
Australia does not have a long line of CCS projects to show for its history of government support.
Before it was heralded by Energy Minister Angus Taylor as one of Australia’s five “priority technologies” in tackling emissions, carbon capture and storage found favour and funding from Kevin Rudd’s first government.
The then-prime minister in 2008 announced $400m to establish the Global Carbon and Capture and Storage Institute, while in 2007 then environment minister Malcolm Turnbull announced a $100m grant for a proposed coal plant at the Loy Yang suitable for CCS. According to The Australia Institute, more than $3.5bn was committed to CCS-related projects between 2003 and 2017, with only $1.3bn actually distributed.
Well over a decade later, Australia does not have a long line of CCS projects to show for that history of government support.
The world’s largest CCS project does sit within Australia, within Chevron’s giant Gorgon LNG project on Western Australia’s Barrow Island, but it was beset by years of technical problems and delays. It appears to be finally ironing out those kinks, having earlier this year sequestered its one-millionth tonne of carbon dioxide.
Another big CCS project could get the green light later this year when Santos considers the merits of its proposed CCS operation in South Australia’s Cooper Basin.
Put simply, CCS involves stripping out carbon emissions from an industrial process, compressing the CO2, transporting it and injecting it into an underground reservoir.
Both the Chevron and Santos projects have the advantage of sitting atop substantial depleted oil and gas reservoirs, making them much more cost-effective than most other CCS proposals.
The vast improvements in the cost competitiveness of wind and solar means old plans to capture emissions from coal-fired power plants are no longer talked about: it is simply cheaper and easier to put those dollars into renewables.
Now the focus is on finding ways to apply CCS to those industries, such as the manufacture of fertiliser, explosives and cement, that are big sources of emissions but cannot easily be electrified.
That remains challenging, technically and financially.
Tony Wood, the energy program director at The Grattan Institute, supports the government trying to boost the prospects of CCS by expanding the investment mandate of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. “It’s a very ill-considered view to simply say ‘We want more renewables’.
“We all want more renewables, but renewables itself doesn’t solve the entire problem,” he said. “We can electrify everything we can think of but we’ll still be left with other things that produce emissions that are going to be hard.”
Linda Stalker, science director at the CSIRO’s National Geosequestration Laboratory, said CCS could help improve the prospects of other clean technologies, such as hydrogen from gas, and other high-emission technologies. “Although the outside world may think CCS has come and gone and come and gone, it’s been quite steady progress in a number of areas for the last 15 to 20 years in Australia,” she said.