Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

You are correct, I am masking about the broader framework, Minister, but we are here to legislate a significant step. I'm not having a go; I'm just pointing out the obvious. We are here to legislate a significant step forward for current domestic operations, companies that have depleted oilfields in the ocean. There are a lot of them around my state of Tasmania, in Bass Strait, off the coast of Victoria and off Western Australian as well as in other parts of the country such as the Northern Territory.

We're going to legislate to allow them to potentially import carbon dioxide from overseas or, at least, say they're going to or they want to. I am very concerned that we are going to let these oil and gas companies off the hook. I don't think it's been talked about, and it needs to be. I think this whole CCS thing is a scam and a sham anyway—and I've been on the record about that, and so have my colleagues and a lot of other people—in terms of whether it can help reduce emissions or help facilitate oil and gas companies. But I think this is a double scam and potentially a multibillion-dollar scam, because this is going to let oil and gas companies off the hook for their decommissioning requirements.

This does not just apply to this legislation; it also applies to the seven acreage areas that have now been awarded by NOPSEMA to companies. By the way, companies can apply for these. NOPSEMA doesn't go around and say, 'We think these are suitable areas for carbon capture and storage.' The process is that if you're an oil or gas company you can apply for where you want to do this. And, of course, all the companies have these depleted fields, and they're liabilities on their balance sheets, and they're going to NOPSEMA and saying, 'I'm interested in having one of these, thank you very much.' This is a significant concern. I don't want to vote for a piece of legislation that's going to facilitate that.

Australians are sick and tired of the big majority of these companies not paying tax, particularly the PRRT, the 'petroleum rort rent tax', which has now got hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits. I heard Senator Scarr arcing up the other day, talking about how we don't understand finance, but what Senator Scarr doesn't understand is that seven years ago I initiated an inquiry into this which found that companies were able to compound their exploration and operating expenditure by 10 per cent per annum against tax, just to get them to invest here. This legislation, which was 30 years old, was to try to attract investment, and it has allowed hundreds of billions of dollars to float out of Australian schools and hospitals, exactly where we need money. Anyway, I digress.

Minister, another reason we've moved these amendments is, once again, to cover the liabilities of these projects. It's been mentioned in the second reading debate and in questioning already—even Senator Hanson raised this point—that these are risky projects because of the potential leakage of CO2. We've seen that at Gorgon, and we have seen leakage of CO2 in the established fields in Norway—perhaps not through the anticline but certainly out of the established fields—and it's been a significant source of concern.

Minister, are you aware of the significant body of research that talks about the potential for earthquakes being triggered because of large-scale geological storage of carbon dioxide? There are number of reports, and this is something we love about the scientific process: scientists and researchers go out and publish their information and, if other scientists disagree, they can publish a peer review. We need more of that in our day and age of disinformation. Scientists are great in the way they work. It's all impersonal. There is a significant body of work. For example, there is one report, which has been peer reviewed—and you can read all the detail in the report, and I'm happy to provide the names of the authors to you—that says:

We argue here that there is a high probability that earthquakes will be triggered by injection of large volumes of CO2 into the brittle rocks commonly found in continental interiors. Because even small- to moderate-size earthquakes threaten the seal integrity of CO2 repositories, in this context, large-scale CCS—

carbon capture and storage—

is a risky, and likely unsuccessful, strategy for … reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Anyway, there is a lot of technical detail there and there are a lot of concerns that have been raised around the potential for leakage, structural damage and, of course, the impacts on the marine environment—not to mention that it's going to supercharge climate change if these things don't work.

Minister, are you aware of the risks posed by, in particular, the seismic testing that is required for these fields and the correlation between seismic testing and potential earthquakes?