How Western Australia can cut emissions to zero – and grow our economy

A globally respected expert has outlined proposed carbon budgets for Western Australia to align with both its Paris Agreement obligations and “aspiration” of net zero emissions by 2050 – and identified a way for renewables to fuel the state's export economy for years to come.

Physicist, climate change scientist and Murdoch University Adjunct Professor Bill Hare has laid bare a vision for WA involving rapidly phasing out coal and LNG and transitioning to renewables for a roughly 70 per cent reduction in emissions from the power sector on 2005 levels.

Professor Hare spoke to a crowd at the University of WA on Monday about the big picture – electrification of transport, climate-proofed buildings, replacing fossil fuels in making steel from iron ore – but also tackled WA’s elephant in the room; slowing the LNG industry’s “runaway train” of carbon emissions that have reversed Australia’s progress towards its Paris target.

The report singles out US company Chevron and Australian company Woodside as among the nation's biggest polluters. Credit: File images

Professor Hare has been involved in shaping global responses to climate change for three decades, including advising developing countries on climate strategy and authoring intergovernmental reports.

His speech to a sell-out crowd at the Climate Change Symposium run by four WA universities and hosted by UWA outlined the contents of his submission to the state government's climate policy, presently out for public consultation.

Professor Hare outlined the role hydrogen could play as replacement fuel in both WA and in the markets the state supplies with LNG, and how LNG companies could position themselves to use existing renewable technology for a dual purpose.

It involved immediately beginning and rapidly upscaling their use of renewables to reduce currently skyrocketing carbon emissions to zero within 30 years, and then upscaling those renewables for the production and export of hydrogen instead of LNG, after hydrogen demand eclipsed gas.

Hydrogen is a high-quality energy source made by using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

Professor Hare told WAtoday it was “a very clean fuel if made cleanly” using power from wind and solar farms.

When burnt, it produced far less pollution than natural gas. It could be used in industry, power and for fuel cell electric vehicles, which have seen investment from Japanese manufacturers interested in the technology's advantages over batteries for heavy vehicles such as trucks.

Japan, China and South Korea – WA’s biggest LNG customers – had strategies to bring in hydrogen on a large scale, not only because of climate change but to diversify supply for energy security.

Current (dark blue) and proposed (light blue) Australian LNG projects and their annual capacity.Credit: Clean State/CCWA

Professor Hare said WA was uniquely suited for hydrogen production thanks to abundant wind and sunshine, particularly in the Mid West and Pilbara, with sun during the day and wind at night to provide consistent power for industrial-scale hydrogen manufacturing plants.

“Other places in the world with that combination are remote or have geopolitical problems like the Horn of Africa,” Professor Hare said.

“We are ideally located and have economic and geopolitical stability. These [Asian] countries look to Australia as a secure energy supplier.”

Professor Hare said the CSIRO had produced a roadmap indicating hydrogen would be cost-competitive with LNG by the mid-2020s, based on declining cost technology – the next step lies with developing supply chains and transport.

And while green hydrogen would play a role across the WA economy, including in the iron ore industry, he said its biggest potential impact could be in the LNG industry.

As detailed in last week’s Runaway Train report from the Conservation Council of WA and Clean State, emissions from LNG production produced about 32 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year from WA’s five operating plants.

Those emissions alone will cancel out the entire anticipated lifetime pollution reduction achieved by the federal government’s $4.55 billion Emissions Reduction Fund, the central plank of its climate policy, within 12 years.

Professor Hare said LNG companies could address pollution across all aspects of production through investment in renewables infrastructure, and could treat it as step one of a transition to the export of renewable hydrogen.

Explainer: Decarbonising then transitioning WA’s LNG industry

Leaving aside for the moment the emissions from WA’s international customers burning LNG, there are three major points at which the five plants’ production pollute in this state.

Pollution stream 1: reservoir gas, CO2 naturally occurring in the gas reservoir that has to be vented. This can vary from 2 per cent of the reservoir (as in Woodside’s North West Shelf) or 12 per cent of the reservoir and 40 per cent of total project emissions (Chevron’s Gorgon) or more. Only 2 (check) of WA’s five LNG plants are currently required by government to offset or mitigate reservoir emissions.

Technologies are emerging to capture and store this carbon. One is to reinject it underground (as Chevron is at present attempting with experimental system at Gorgon). The other, Professor Hare said, was an Icelandic technology of mineralisation, trapping the carbon in rock.

There is the potential to “offset” this damage through carbon farming and so on, as recommended by the Environmental Protection Authority before the government instructed it to withdraw this advice, though offsets are not considered a silver bullet as emissions still go up in the short term.

Pollution stream 2: the energy used to liquefy 85 per cent of the gas for export (most of what’s kept for the WA market stays in gas form).

This process presently chews up about 9 per cent of the energy obtained from the reservoir and accounts for a sizeable chunk of the total project pollution, according to Professor Hare.

“You could electrify all of that. Not overnight, but you could really introduce a lot of renewable power fairly quickly,” he said.

Pollution stream 3: ‘fugitive emissions’; methane escaping at all stages of the cycle. Professor Hare says the above measures, plus process improvements of gas management onsite, would address this.

With lax government regulation of pollution, there has been little compelling companies to investigate these options.

But Professor Hare said the Paris Agreement's implementation would affect LNG demand globally.

"We have looked at the major energy system models to see what they are looking at for Asian LNG demand, particularly in the power sector," he said.

"That peaks by 2030 and drops rapidly to be close to zero by 2050. That is not the preferred scenario for the LNG industry – they are talking about a 70-year lifetime – but if the world implements the Paris Agreement there is no way that could be true.

"As LNG demand begins to peak in Asia there would be a rising market for hydrogen and guess what? WA has all the technology, capacity and infrastructure to do that and it would happen in the regions we are presently exporting to."

Professor Hare said while LNG plants couldn't make hydrogen, by building the renewable energy systems they would also build the basis for cheap hydrogen production, which could then be exported.

“There are already massive [wind and solar farm] proposals in the Pilbara for renewable energy to produce hydrogen,” he said.

But where the push will come from remains unclear.

"I don’t think the LNG industry really wants to capture carbon at a reservoir level but it has to be looked at," Professor Hare said.

"If you look at the other sectors we know more or less how to get the emissions down to the right level, but the LNG sector, if you don’t do anything with that the emissions will keep growing. You have to say, is that right?

"The politics of climate are changing quickly, and behind the scenes the big companies are worried about losing their social licence. They jump frantically on any call for emission control, and in the end that belies an underlying concern they will be called upon to make the emission reductions everyone else will have to make.

"The question for me is: how do we turn this into an opportunity?"

The state’s Climate Change issues paper is now out for public consultation, closing November 29.