Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

The International Energy Agency says that improved energy efficiency and CCS—carbon capture and storage—represent the two most viable options currently available to bring down greenhouse gas emissions into the medium term. That is why the government embraces both of those courses of action.

You can see the beginnings of demonstration projects in the Otway Basin in Victoria. You can also see it at the Callide A power station in Queensland and the oxy-fuel combustion technology which is proposed to be trialled there by way of retrofitting, and you can also see post-combustion capture technology in two other power stations in Australia—one in black coal in New South Wales and the other to be based in brown coal in Victoria. On Saturday I took the opportunity to visit Santos’s operations in Moomba and for them to brief me on their proposals for a three-stage carbon capture facility—the Moomba carbon storage project. This is an exciting project. I commend the company for their active support for CCS technologies. Together with those other project possibilities around the country, we begin to see the emergence of a way forward in bringing down greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power stations and, more generally, from carbon based fuels in Australia.

On Friday, the Minister for Resources and Energy, Martin Ferguson, and I launched a global carbon capture and storage institute, which Australia will support. What is the proposal? It goes into two parts. Right around the world at present you see a whole range of research going on but ineffective coordination of that research and, with the four principal technologies alive with carbon capture and storage, you see very thin at-scale industrial application of these technologies. The problem we face is that time is running out. We need to make sure that these industrial scale projects get going.

The best definition of an industrial style project is something 250 megawatts or more. So many of the projects which are currently underway around the world which go by the rubric of demonstration projects are very small indeed. We need to have them at scale not only so we can demonstrate that the technology works at scale but also so we can calculate the cost differential between a 250-megawatt station without CCS technology applied as opposed to one with CCS technology applied and then work out where that difference is to be met in the future by way of investment activity by government, corporates and others. This of course is directly relevant to the future architecture of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme as well.

Why we have put forward this global carbon capture and storage institute is to assist in bringing together all this research and technology investigatory activity around the world into a single entity to the best extent possible. This is a global public good and the world needs to have a go-to place to access that technology for at-scale projects. But there is one further reason, and this is also the big gap at the moment.

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