Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

Thanks, Senator Hanson. To start with the technology: for many years now, for reasons that are actually unrelated to climate action, oil and gas projects have, for various reasons, been operationally required to eject carbon dioxide into geological formations. The advice I have is that the experience through the oil and gas sector is that the placement of carbon dioxide into geological formations is relatively stable. There's been discussion now for some decades about whether a process of this kind could be used to take carbon dioxide that's produced as a by-product of energy generation activities or industrial activities and similarly store it underground so as to prevent it being released into the atmosphere. The reason for doing so would be to minimise the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and the reason we seek to do that is the relationship between the release of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere and global warming.

The regulatory environment is important because there are a range of impacts that you might need to consider when you're undertaking projects of that kind. They would be, potentially, impacts on the marine environment, impacts on worker health and safety and other kinds of questions that might be necessary to manage if you were undertaking a project of any kind. It's important to have clear how those issues would be managed for projects of this kind. Australia has its own regulatory arrangements for projects of this kind that are conducted within Australian waters. The bill before us seeks to create a framework to establish the regulatory environment where there is a transboundary movement of carbon dioxide from one territory to another.