Scott Morrison’s loving embrace and monetary backing of the fuel business has been a defining characteristic of his prime ministership.
Hit with a historic pandemic, Morrison selected fuel – not renewables – to fireside an financial restoration.
Plans to create a brand new hydrogen export business will use fuel. The federal government has – anachronistically within the face of the local weather disaster – given fossil gas a central position in reaching internet zero which it claims to have a plan for, however in actuality doesn’t.
In contrast to coal, fuel doesn’t lend itself to being held up in parliament. However you believe you studied if Morrison may have, he would have.
“We’ve acquired to get the fuel,” he mentioned in January 2019. His power minister, Angus Taylor, has claimed exporting fuel will reduce emissions within the area.
All of this flies within the face of a number of scientific research and the Worldwide Vitality Company which all say there might be no extra new fuel developments if (and that “if” ought to actually be in daring and CAPS) the worst of the local weather disaster is to be averted.
However Morrison, Taylor and the fuel business constantly attain for a “get-out-of-catastrophe free” card on this recreation of Monopoly (local weather disaster version).
That card is carbon seize, utilisation and storage (CCUS) – an costly, complicated and serially underperforming method to seize CO2 the place it’s being launched after which lock it away, often in geological formations underground.
This week the chair of the Australian Petroleum Manufacturing and Exploration Affiliation (Appea), Ian Davies, advised his annual convention the business “should meet” the problem of decarbonisation, saying “the know-how that’s essential for us to realize this at scale is carbon seize, utilisation and storage – a confirmed know-how”.
Whereas Davies mentioned it was an method first utilized by Exxon within the Nineteen Seventies, the fact is that after billions of dollars in funding globally, this column has written how CCUS initiatives nonetheless solely have the flexibility to seize about 0.3% of the emissions triggered every year by burning fossil fuels.
Australia solely has one industrial carbon seize and storage facility working – the Chevron-led Gorgon undertaking at Barrow Island off Western Australia’s Pilbara coast.
Gorgon is the world’s greatest carbon seize undertaking that's devoted to storing the CO2, which is completely different from the handful of bigger initiatives the place the CO2 is used to push extra oil out of the bottom.
Davies advised the convention Gorgon had saved 6m tonnes of CO2 because it began in mid-2019.
“It’s working,” he mentioned.
This assertion wants greater than a bit of little bit of qualification, as a result of Gorgon has missed government-set targets for capturing CO2, and as a proportion of the emissions that may in the end be launched from that undertaking, it may possibly solely marginally cut back the quantity of additional CO2 that shall be added to the ambiance.
Chevron Australia’s director of operations, Kory Judd, was rather less emphatic earlier this week, telling Reuters: “We’ve nonetheless acquired a methods to go to satisfy the dedication to what we now have the injection system designed for. What we’re doing is making an attempt to be taught our approach via the way you inject CO2 into the reservoirs, how do they reply, then how do you do this reliably and the way do you do this and get to the purpose to assembly the commitments that you just’ve acquired.”
At Gorgon, the CO2 that comes up with the fuel when it’s drilled in offshore fields is extracted and injected beneath Barrow Island.
However there have been a number of expensive technical points. Within the final monetary yr, Gorgon injected 2.17m tonnes of CO2 – about 1m tonnes wanting its goal.
After the CO2 is extracted, what’s left is generally methane to be compressed to liquefied pure fuel (LNG) and transported abroad the place it's burned, releasing much more CO2 than is captured.
How rather more? One evaluation from the Australia Institute prompt that if Gorgon was each injecting and producing fuel at full capability then over a five-year interval, about 260m tonnes of CO2 shall be emitted and solely 20m tonnes captured.
It doesn't matter what the claims, carbon seize and storage is just not working at wherever near a scale that might considerably decrease emissions – regardless of the billions in taxpayers’ money thrown at it through the years.
Is fuel actually chopping emissions?
Throughout his speech, the Australian Petroleum Manufacturing and Exploration Affiliation (Appea) chair, Ian Davies, repeated a declare that Australia’s LNG had the potential to decrease emissions “in importing nations by round 166m tonnes of carbon dioxide every year by changing higher-emission fuels”.
Appea advised this column the 166 Mt determine is from the federal government’s long-term emissions discount plan report. However that report doesn't say how the determine is calculated – simply that it got here from unpublished evaluation by the division of business.
Temperature Test has requested the division how the determine was reached, however was advised it couldn’t reply as a result of the federal government was in caretaker mode.
However when Taylor made an identical declare in 2019, the division mentioned it was based mostly on the idea that the entire LNG exported by Australia was burned for energy (however didn’t say what sort of fuel plant it was burned in, as some are extra environment friendly than others). They then in contrast that to the identical quantity of energy if it was generated from burning coal.
For this determine to be credible, the entire LNG exported would must be burned and this may must be displacing using coal, quite than simply satisfying Asia’s rising demand for power.
“The determine is just improper. The concept LNG is substituting coal is improper. It’s not occurring,” mentioned fuel business finance analyst Bruce Robertson of the Institute for Vitality Economics and Monetary Evaluation, a thinktank monitoring the transformation of the world’s power methods.
Robertson mentioned some LNG in Australia’s main markets of China and Japan is used for heating, not energy technology. LNG is definitely being displaced by renewables, he mentioned, and most new LNG energy crops in Asia are to cowl short-term gaps in provide and are much less environment friendly than those who have historically offered baseload energy.
Additionally not thought of, mentioned Robertson, is that if solely about 2% of methane fuel leaks from pipes alongside the availability chain then the local weather influence of that potent greenhouse fuel renders LNG simply as dangerous, or worse, than coal.
Evaluating apples with watermelons
In what the Morrison authorities described because the daybreak of a brand new power export business earlier this yr, Morrison and Taylor have been effusive over a world-first cargo of so known as “clear hydrogen”.
On the time, authorities media releases mentioned if the pilot Hydrogen Vitality Provide Chain undertaking went industrial it might flip Latrobe Valley coal into hydrogen and “save” 1.8m tonnes of CO2 a yr (which, by the way in which, is an unimpressive one-ninth of the emissions of the coal=fired energy station that’s subsequent door to the undertaking).
This column had requested HESC and the federal government how that 1.8 Mt was calculated, however acquired no reply. However now we all know. Firstly, the federal government relied on info offered by HESC.
In freedom of data paperwork highlighted in a brand new report from the Australia Institute on the undertaking, HESC mentioned it merely in contrast two completely different strategies of constructing hydrogen – one which makes use of fuel in a course of known as steam methane reforming, and its personal method that gasifies coal.
Truly, that’s not fairly it.
The kicker is that HESC in contrast the steam methane course of with out carbon seize (although no less than two crops, one in Texas and one other in Alberta use steam methane with carbon seize), and its personal course of with carbon seize.
That isn't a good comparability.
Rinse and repeat
On Sunday, the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, repeated a declare that Australia’s report on emissions was a lot better than Canada and New Zealand, and higher than the common of OECD nations.
It is a declare this column has explored earlier than. Placing apart falls in emissions from a slowing of land clearing within the final three many years – which the federal authorities has had nothing to do with – Australia’s emissions should not higher than the OECD common.
An in depth ABC Reality Test on Frydenberg’s most up-to-date claims round Australia’s comparative report – one repeated on social media posts by the Liberal occasion – additionally discovered it “deceptive”.
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