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Clean coal plan needs Australian money

March 28, 2008 11:00pm

AUSTRALIAN scientists are looking underground to test controversial techniques that aim to find a cleaner future for coal and gas, Kerrie Sinclair writes.

Millions embrace darkness tonight to highlight their concern over climate change. But there's no light yet shed on which energy sources can support a plugged-in lifestyle without frying the planet.

Annual emissions of carbon dioxide – the most important of the greenhouse gases causing temperature rises – have surged by 80 per cent between 1970 and 2004, mainly due to use of coal, oil and gas for energy supplies, transport and industrial use.

Forecasts show coal – when burned the most polluting of fossil fuels – and gas – about half as polluting as coal – together are set to provide 60 per cent of the world's energy by 2030.

United Nations climate advisers have urged countries to move away from coal-fired power plants and towards gas, nuclear power and renewable energy such as solar, wind and hydropower.

Portugal is its star pupil. Its 10.6 million people now get more than 40 per cent of baseload electricity from solar, wind and tidal power. It views its plentiful sunshine and long coast the way Venezuela views its oil.

Australia by 2020 faces damage from climate change to the Great Barrier Reef and Wet Tropics, intensifying water scarcity in southern and eastern Australia by 2030, and by 2050 rising risks for coastal populations from increased sea levels and more powerful storms.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, in a Lateline interview this month, was asked how Australia would steer its greenhouse gas emissions to peak within seven to 10 years, as well as if baseload power from non-fossil-fuel energy was possible.

She referred to "clean coal" technology eight times.

Clean coal technology, where the carbon dioxide is instead captured and pumped into deep underground storage, is yet to be demonstrated on a large scale.

The Australian Government's climate change adviser, Ross Garnaut, this week said coal's future largely hinged on progress with carbon capture and storage.

"The pay-off . . . could be a prosperous coal industry future," Professor Garnaut said.

"But if it doesn't work, then the prospects for the coal industry in the long term, both the export and the domestic component, are much bleaker."

Not enough governments and energy industry investors are rallying behind "clean coal". It has a public opinion problem as well.

A Lowy Institute poll late last year found about 92 per cent of Australians favoured wind, solar and geothermal technologies to cut emissions. The least convincing method was clean coal – slightly less convincing than nuclear power.

Coal is finding it even harder to come clean after the delay – some say collapse – of a flagship US project called FutureGen from which the US energy department has withdrawn funding, partly due to swelling cost.

Clean coal proponents say it's not a knockout blow but say a global push is urgently needed to get clean coal proved technically and commercially.

Citi Investment Research analyst Elaine Prior says recent delays in mooted carbon capture and storage demonstration projects worldwide "make us query whether and when clean coal will be a reality".

"At the moment we don't have an example of an integrated project that generates electricity and captures CO2 and injects it on a commercial or even a reasonable demonstration scale. So we would be watching for any project that was to demonstrate it but the other thing is really looking to see if government and industry commit to large-scale initial projects in that area," she said.

Brisbane-based scientist Kelly Thambimuthu is chief executive of the Centre for Low Emissions Technology and chairman of the International Energy Agency's Greenhouse Gas Program, a partnership of about 20 countries and multinational companies trying to establish low-emission use of fossil fuels.

He is also on the board of FutureGen rival, Queensland's flagship clean-coal project near Rockhampton, called ZeroGen. It is estimated to cost about $1.7 billion and hasn't yet fully secured its funding.

"ZeroGen has become doubly important now FutureGen has disappeared," Dr Thambimuthu says.

"It's probably the most advanced, in terms of planning, clean coal project using IGCC (a type of CCS technology). It today is the most advanced of the IGCC projects in the world and if it meets its demonstration plant timetable, it will likely be the first one to build, in an integrated sense, a large plant like this."

He has worked on an IEA proposal, to be put to a July meeting in Japan of G8 nations' heads of state, urging them to throw their weight behind getting at least 20 large-scale demonstration plants up worldwide by 2020, using clean coal technology for commercial application.

"The people who invest in and operate power plants are very risk averse and will only put in place things that have been demonstrated to work. Although clean coal technology works in different pieces, it hasn't been put together in power-generation scale. That's what we've got to throw money at," he says.

"We have power plant technology. We build those routinely. We have carbon dioxide capturing equipment that has been used in the oil and gas sector for almost 40 years. We have examples of projects where CO2 has been injected underground around the world.

"But what we are now trying to do is bring carbon capture and storage to power generation. So when we build these first plants, we'll be piecing these various bits together, developing a package and reducing the cost of that package. That's what we're aiming to do," Dr Thambimuthu says.

This Wednesday one of Australia's most prominent projects aiming to show CO2 can be safely injected and stored underground, will swing into action – pumping CO2 in liquid form more than 2km below to a depleted natural gas field in the Otway Basin near Warrnambool in south-western Victoria.

CSIRO scientist Jim Smitham says the Otway project is pivotal for showing some of the monitoring techniques possible and for scientists to weigh how to best assess if a particular geology can sustain CO2 storage permanently with no risk of leaks. "Of interest is, during the injection phase, can you detect any untoward leaks?" Dr Smitham says.

"The monitoring sub-surface is to ensure the CO2 fluid is being distributed according to plan. The above-surface monitoring is to pick up whether there's any CO2 being emitted from faults or previously undiscovered bore holes."

Environment groups are concerned underground CO2 storage isn't safe, fearing inadequate monitoring of storage sites, particularly in poorer countries.

They say the focus on coal, an ancient energy form, is styming a 21st century energy revolution led by energy sources such as solar, wind and hydropower.

Australia's new Federal Government has put $500 million towards clean coal projects and $500 million toward renewable energy but the Australian Conservation Foundation says billions in government subsidies give fossil fuels a vast advantage.