Madeleine King (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in support of this bill, the Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment (Using New Technologies to Fight Climate Change) Bill 2023. As I have said before in this place, there are few bigger global challenges than addressing climate change. Reaching Australia's legislated net zero targets requires transforming every sector of the Australian economy, and, as the CSIRO makes clear, no single technology alone will get us to net zero. There is no silver bullet. It will take a mix of technologies to drive decarbonisation outcomes across our economy. Carbon capture, utilisation and storage will be an important part of that mix of technologies. To quote the International Energy Agency: 'Reaching net zero will be virtually impossible without carbon capture, utilisation and storage.'

Australian resource projects and our world-class universities are increasingly at the leading edge globally in their plans to deploy commercial-scale CCUS technologies. Despite what many may think and have said, CCUS is in fact a proven technology. Indeed, eight million tonnes of CO2 has been stored off Barrow Island on the Western Australian coast and more will be stored into the future. I fail to see how taking eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is a bad thing, as some people like to portray it.

Just last week, the Western Australian minister for resources, Bill Johnston, and I attended a symposium at Curtin University that provided many insights into some of the novel CCUS research being led out of Australian universities. We heard from Curtin PhD students Theo Alogalis, who is a young man from France, and Egi Adrian Pratama, from Indonesia, who, alongside their colleagues, are pursuing some truly groundbreaking work on microbubble carbon capture and storage technology. It was heartening to see some of our brightest minds working to advance CCUS research in this country.

It was also clear from the symposium that Japanese industry, including Tokyo Gas, Mitsui, MIMI, JERA and Osaka Gas, are firmly backing this groundbreaking research and see a strong future for CCUS in Australia. Of course, Japan have a goal of net zero emissions by 2050 and they will depend on partnerships to be able to make that happen for their community and for the benefit of all of us.

To put Australian CCUS projects in a competitive position and to back in our research efforts and unlock more private sector capital, it is imperative that we invest in our regulatory frameworks to ensure that they are fit for purpose. In the last federal budget the government invested $12 million to review and modernise our offshore environmental and carbon capture and storage regulations. This timely review will help to provide regulatory and administrative certainty for projects looking to sequester carbon dioxide in Australia's offshore areas. The government's efforts to create regulatory and administrative certainty extend to ratifying our international obligations under the London protocol, and that is the ratification enabled by this bill today.

In 2009 Australia agreed an amendment to the London protocol that enables the safe export of carbon dioxide for storage in geological formations under the seabed. In 2013 another London protocol amendment, which allows for the regulation of material placed into the seabed for legitimate scientific research into marine geoengineering, was also agreed. Importantly, ratification of the 2009 amendment will help to create a commercial pathway for transboundary CCUS projects, potentially including the Bayu-Undan gas field. Revenue from the Bayu-Undan gas field, located in the Timor Sea about 500 kilometres north of Darwin, has been a major contributor to the economy of Timor-Leste over 16 years, but the Bayu-Undan reservoir is now depleted of that resource.

As a reservoir that safely held gas for millennia, it is eminently suitable to return to that role and hold gas, this time CO2, for further millennia.

This government will always be a strong supporter of Timor-Leste's economic independence and resilience. It is therefore essential that our regulatory settings enable consideration of a commercial pathway for CCUS in the Bayu-Undan field. In ratifying the 2009 amendment we join the United Kingdom, Norway, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, the Republic of Korea, Denmark and many others who have already acted to enshrine this amendment in law. I thank the Minister for the Environment and Water for her carriage of this very important bill. I also want to acknowledge the work of the House Standing Committee on Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water—and particularly the chair of that committee, the member for Makin—which recommended that the government ratify these amendments to the London protocol. I also thank Senator Grogan and the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee for similarly recommending that the government pass this bill. On that note, I commend this bill to the House.

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