Coal sector in pipeline pushAndrew Trounson May 22, 2007 THE...

Coal sector in pipeline push
Andrew Trounson
May 22, 2007

THE coal industry is pushing for a national plan to construct the thousands of kilometres of pipeline needed to ferry carbon dioxide emissions around the country to underground geological formations.
The sector will also be looking to federal and state governments to help shoulder the cost of building the network.

Yesterday, resource giants BP and Rio Tinto launched a $2 billion project to build, in Western Australia, the country's first project aimed at gasifying coal emissions and burying them deep underground in a process called carbon sequestration.

But the key to keeping Australia's coal power viable in a carbon-constrained world will be developing giant underground storage reservoirs along the country's coal-rich east coast. This will involve developing a massive pipeline network.

While there are plenty of suitable geologically formed storage sites around the country, they are not always where the power stations or coal resources are. In Victoria, coal emissions are likely to be pumped into oil and gas wells in the Bass Strait. NSW and Queensland generators face having to pipe emissions hundreds of kilometres to geological formations in the west.

"You are looking at building long pipelines and they will be common-user pipelines," Australian Coal Association chief executive officer Mark O'Neill said.

"The infrastructure network is something we'd like to see in a national plan," he said, suggesting development under the banner of the Council of Australian Governments.

One of the reasons the coal industry is sceptical about the Queensland Government's own $1 billion ZeroGen coal gasification and sequestration plan is that it involves piping the carbon dioxide from the Stanwell power plant in Rockhampton, some 220km away, for geological storage in the west, near Emerald.

The industry is now believed to be looking at building a gasification and carbon sequestration plant in Queensland's Surat Basin, near both the coalfields and suitable geological storage sites.

According to Peter Cook, head of a government carbon sequestration pilot project in Victoria, geological storage sites will be key factors that utilities must consider in deciding where to build new coal and gas-fired power plants.

"You won't just be looking at where you can generate the carbon dioxide, but also where you store it," Dr Cook said.

As with ZeroGen, BP and Rio are looking to convert coal into clean-burning hydrogen gas, though their project is five times the size of ZeroGen.

There are other projects under way to gasify coal which have the added advantage of being retro-fitted to existing power stations, whereas hydrogen plants need to be designed for the purpose.

These other technologies include chemically capturing the emissions after the gas and coal are burned, and oxy-fuel technology in which carbon dioxide is stripped out by using pure oxygen to burn the fuel.