Country to Focus on Storage, Not Utilization
Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
4/10/2015
Coal will continue to dominate Australia’s energy production well into the future and, as a result the country will strive to foster a growing carbon capture and storage industry, according to an energy white paper the Australian Department of Industry and Science released this week. However, the country expects this increased growth in CCS to be largely brought about by industry with minimal direct government support. “Investment decisions on future generation assets, including choice of technology, are best made by industry, given its insights into market needs. The Australian Government will seek to maintain stable and predictable policy settings across the range of areas that affect such investment decisions, while taking a technology-neutral approach,” the white paper says.
Utilization of carbon has been integral in many other countries, such as Canada and the United States, in developing a business case for CCS, but the practice has not proven particularly lucrative in Australia, according the white paper. “Australia has worked closely with other countries which rely heavily on fossil fuels to investigate opportunities to utilise CO2 in products such as carbonated drinks and plastics or to enhance the growth of oil-rich algae in solar bioreactors to produce biofuel. While these processes are promising, there is no commercial CO2 re-use in Australia, largely reflecting the high cost of capturing the CO2 from a flue gas stream,” the white paper says.
Instead of focusing government funds on finding ways to utilize CO2, the Australian government will invest in CO2 storage, the white paper says. “Currently, geological storage is the only way to permanently remove large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. The capacity to store CO2 will be critical to Australia’s continued reliance on coal-fired power stations and our capacity to reduce emissions from our LNG sector,” the paper says. “In Australia, the focus of Australian Government investment will be on ensuring Australia has the capacity to permanently store CO2 in deep geological formations where necessary. Australia’s first operating carbon capture and storage (CCS) project, Chevron’s Gorgon LNG project, aims to begin storing approximately 3.4–4 megatonnes of CO2 underground each year from 2016. The Gorgon project will be the world’s largest CO2 storage project. Australia is set to be largely an early adopter of carbon capture technology. We have invested significantly in driving global approaches to lowering the cost of capture through the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute and the IEA.”
