Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The members for Bendigo and Melbourne have spoken this morning about climate change, and so will I. In the lead up to the 2015 United Nations climate change conference in Paris, the Prime Minister has said that Australia could be in for major adjustments on climate change policy by 2017. That statement was somewhat mystifying to members of his own party, to whom he has promised that there would be no change in existing climate policies.

Australians are entitled to know just what the Prime Minister has in mind. As things stand, the Prime Minister presides over a government that has no effective policy to reduce emissions and continues to hand out massive sums to producers. For example, the Minister for the Environment supports a proposal to rebuild the Hazelwood Power Station with direct injection carbon engines, otherwise known as DICE generators, to run on a slurry of pulverised coal and water. Research on this scheme has been squandering public funds for at least 25 years and has so far failed to produce a single usable diesel engine running on coal-water slurry. Indeed, a pilot plant at the CSIRO laboratories at Lucas Heights in Sydney was abandoned when an independent scientist demonstrated that the energy required to run the equipment that produced the coal-water slurry consumed more energy than the engine produced. To replace the six 200-megawatt steam turbines at Hazelwood with DICE engines would require the equivalent of 20 80-megawatt diesel engines, the largest ever built. So far, the CSIRO's energy labs in Newcastle have done no more than run a single-cylinder four-litre diesel engine on coal slurry.

According to a study produced by Parsons Brinckerhoff for the then New Zealand Electricity Commission in 2009, the capital cost for engines of the kind proposed for the Hazelwood DICE installations is approximately $2,000 per kilowatt or $3.2 billion in total for that power station. Homeowners know that rooftop solar photovoltaic systems can be produced for around $1,000 per kilowatt and produce no emissions, yet the minister proposes to spend double that amount per kilowatt for an emissions reduction of no more than 50 per cent. Hazelwood emits around 16 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, which means that cutting those emissions by 50 per cent with DICE engines would cost $400 per tonne, 30 times more than the average of $13 per tonne paid by the Emissions Reduction Fund under the government's Direct Action scheme.

In 2009 the Prime Minister said, in reference to Direct Action, it was 'a con, an environmental fig leaf to cover a determination to do nothing'. The government should get rid of the Direct Action payments, which are a waste of taxpayers' money, and support Labor's plans for serious climate action and for renewable energy.