Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to make a contribution tonight to the national debate on nuclear energy. The Prime Minister appointed a nuclear power task force in a cynical attempt to divert the negative attention he was receiving for his last overseas trip and in the hope that the Labor Party would split on the issue. The Labor Party has not split on this issue. We are against nuclear energy in Australia. The government has claimed that nuclear energy is necessary in Australia because it is clean power and makes no, or very little, contribution to greenhouse gases. On the other hand, it claims that coal is a source of dirty energy that contributes massively to the greenhouse effect.

In this debate the government has completely ignored two new technologies in which Australia is making a significant contribution. The first I would like to talk about tonight is geosequestration. Geosequestration involves capturing carbon dioxide during the power generation process and storing it under the ground. Carbon capture and storage projects are already occurring throughout the world. In Sleipner in Norway carbon has been stored since 1996 to reduce the amount of carbon tax paid by a commercial scale gas exploration and processing project. At Weyburn in Canada two million tonnes of carbon dioxide have been stored each year since 1996. In addition, a zero emission power plant is under construction near Berlin which will be ready by 2006 where carbon dioxide will be injected into nearby coal seams. There are also significant projects in Poland, France and Algeria.

In Australia, the Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies, the CO²CRC, and the CSIRO are doing very good work. I would like to pay particular tribute to the work of Dr Peter Cook. I have met him and I think he is a great Australian making a significant contribution to this very important field of scientific endeavour. Sixty-six sites have been identified around Australia as potentially suitable for carbon storage. Because coal has been mined so extensively in Australia, we have lots of emptied coal seams which lend themselves to the potential of storing carbon dioxide. The CO²CRC is researching a site in Otway, Victoria, which is expected to result in the injection of carbon dioxide into the ground by 2007. This is the most comprehensive geosequestration project in the world. It will be the first project to actually monitor carbon dioxide before, during and after its injection into the ground.

This is in addition to the Monash geosequestration project with Shell, which has a target date of 2015, and the Gorgan project in Western Australia which is aiming to reinject carbon dioxide from gas production into the ground by 2010. It is true that geosequestration technology is not currently financially viable in Australia, but there are plenty of examples of its being viable throughout the world. The consensus is that storage technology may be viable in Australia in three or four years time, and capture technology from coal fired power stations may take 10 years to fully develop and be commercially viable.

The other technology is hot dry rock geothermal technology, which captures the heat of granites located three kilometres or more under the ground. The heat is extracted from them by circulating water through them in an artificial reservoir. Researchers at the ANU have been looking at hot rock technology for over 10 years, and some of the researchers have founded Geodynamics Ltd, which is currently commercially developing the process in the Cooper Basin in South Australia. I am advised that it is possible that geothermal technology may be commercially viable in Australia in the next few years.

If the government were serious about dealing with the energy needs of our nation while dealing with and reducing our contribution to greenhouse gases, it would be putting technologies like geosequestration and geothermal technology onto the national agenda. These technologies have the potential to substantially reduce our greenhouse gases with none of the risks that go with nuclear power. When you compare the costs and the viability of these two technologies to the costs and the ramp-up time of nuclear energy, these two technologies certainly should not be ruled out as being viable options for Australia’s energy needs into the future. They should certainly be involved in any national debate about the future of Australia’s energy needs. They should certainly be the subject of federal government studies, just as much as nuclear power.(Time expired)