ZeroGen decision on the money

BY pulling out of ZeroGen, the Queensland government has made a pragmatic decision.

It has decided to cut its losses rather than sink more taxpayer money into what was increasingly looking like a prohibitively expensive exercise.

Of the four Australian "flagship" carbon capture and storage projects competing for the $2 billion of federal funding to be announced next year, ZeroGen was considered the least likely prospect.

The project had been revised and reworked, but site constraints collided with the view of researchers around the world that integrated combined cycle gasification -- the technology being explored by ZeroGen -- was going to be a good deal more expensive than anticipated.

According to Peter Cook, chief executive of the Co-operative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies in Canberra, the research effort is swinging back in favour of capturing carbon emissions after the coal has been burned rather than trying to radically alter the coal itself before combustion.

"We are seeing that more conventional ways of making electricity are being looked at again for post-combustion capture," Dr Cook said.

This included both underground storage and research into algae to soak up carbon emissions that could be turned into crude oil and other projects to lock up CO2 emissions in new generation cement-like construction products.

Research will continue on pre-combustion technology that turns coal into a synthesis gas, which is used in a gas turbine to produce electricity, with the heat generated used to drive a steam turbine, including at the Wandoan power plant project, also in Queensland, and in China.

The $150 million written off by the Queensland government on ZeroGen is small beer in the context of the more than $US26 billion ($26.3bn) committed by governments around the world to research and develop CCS technologies.

The fact of life in research is that not every project will bear fruit.

However, the Queensland government said that it remained committed to continuing support for CCS research.

And federal Resources Minister Martin Ferguson said the Australian government was considering advice from the Independent Assessment Panel on allocating $2bn in funding for so-called flagship projects.

"I expect to be in a position to announce the next significant state in the development of CCS flagships in the first half of 2011," Mr Ferguson said.

The remaining projects are:

- The Wandoan power plant project northwest of Brisbane, which is based on integrating General Electric's existing technologies with CO2 storage in the Surat Basin.

- The Collie South West Hub project, which aims to store up to 3.3 mega tonnes of CO2 a year, captured from surrounding industry including coal-fired power plants.

 -The CarbonNet project in Victoria's Latrobe Valley, which aims to store between three and five mega tonnes of CO2 a year, captured from coal-fired power plants in the region.

The $2bn CCS Flagships program was announced in the 2009-10 budget and is part of the federal government's $4.5bn Clean Energy Initiative.

Leaders of the G8 countries who met in Hokkaido in Japan in 2008 had set a goal of having established at least 20 large-scale CCS projects around the world by 2020.