Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Offshore Petroleum Amendment (Greenhouse Gas Storage) Bill 2008 and related bills. Like my colleague the member for Corangamite, I hope the other side of the House will give its full support to this very important bill. I commend the Minister for Resources and Energy for the work he has done in getting the bill to the House. I thank the former Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources, the member for Groom, who has supported this bill in the debate today. I think he was also endeavouring to make something like this happen in the previous government, but he probably did not have the support he needed.

The world is certainly interested in this process and the bill that is before the parliament today. We know that coal is the world’s most dominant energy product. So, if we can produce clean coal, we can do a lot to get the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere. Eighty per cent of Australia’s electricity needs and about 40 per cent of the world’s electricity needs are generated from burning coal. The International Energy Agency forecasts that global energy supply and demand will increase and that, by 2030, 44 per cent of the world’s energy will be generated from burning coal. To do something about this we need to deploy low-emission coal technology—and this bill gives us a legal framework to endeavour to do that. Clean coal technology is certainly coming together, and many people are very confident that we can achieve what is being aimed for. The capture of CO2 in the flumes of coal-fired power stations is being done in a good way. They believe they can find even better answers than they already have done and move to a full operation within some years.

India and China, with their great size and their expansion and their industrialisation, are using more and more coal—hence the figures I quoted earlier. I am sure that, with new technology, we will be able to help the world to capture CO2 and re-inject into the very formations from which we presently take the gas and oil that the world uses today. There is a great need for this bill. I think that need has been well established as a result of the work that has been done. Australia has coal reserves that will last another 400 years, or even more, at the present rate of usage, so we can see the need for such a bill and for the new technology that will enable us to continue to take advantage of this energy source.

Safe injection and storage of CO2 is, of course, what is important, and there is no doubt that the public must have confidence in the process. Of course, the process should be transparent so that people can have that confidence in it. I am confident that this bill and these processes will give us that. As Chair of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Primary Industries and Resources, I brought down the report Down under: greenhouse gas storage, a review of the draft Offshore Petroleum Amendment (Greenhouse Gas Storage) Bill. It was an opportunity to see the great need for us to do that and also an opportunity to make recommendations that allowed us to do that. I was very pleased to say that, in—

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