What to Do With All That Carbon

In December 2007, my government's first act after being elected was to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. We knew it was significant, but the depth of the reaction a few days later at the United Nations conference in Bali on climate change came as a surprise. I had not expected the attendees to feel so strongly that Australia's ratification would help drive momentum at a time when the Bali road map was in danger of stalling.

The Bali talks did not stall. And while Australia may have been late arriving to Kyoto, we are now absolutely determined to lead the way in the run-up to the 2009 Copenhagen talks, particularly on developing carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS) technologies.

Recent climate-change reports, such as the Garnaut Review in Australia, have found that the growth in greenhouse-gas emissions, and hence the severity of climate change, may be worse than previously expected. Carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are the largest and fastest-growing source of greenhouse gases. It is imperative that the world—the United States included—move to a low-emission energy economy, and Australia is determined to play its part in this transformation.

The Australian govern-ment has proposed an initiative to drive the development of carbon-capture technology worldwide. CCS would prevent the release of CO2 into the atmosphere by capturing it at coal-fired power stations and other industrial facilities that process fossil fuel, then transporting it to a suitable site where it would be injected underground for long-term storage.

Why is carbon-capture technology important, and why should Australia be taking the lead? World energy demand is projected to grow by 55 percent between 2005 and 2030. Despite the increase in renewable energy, fossil fuels, especially coal, will remain major sources of the world's energy in the coming decades. Electricity generation accounts for about 40 percent of the world's energy-related CO2 emissions. All major models of how the world can achieve lower greenhouse-gas emissions expect a significant part of the reduction to be achieved through the use of CCS.

Although the science and technology has been successfully demonstrated, and there are many pilot and demonstration projects, there are currently no industrial-scale, fully integrated CCS power stations operating in the world today. This was recognized by the G8 in early 2008 when it called for 20 such projects to be developed by 2020, as a precursor to global deployment.

Australia is well placed to develop this initiative. We have a coal-based energy economy and are the world's largest coal exporter. We have considerable expertise in CCS technologies through a range of research and demonstration programs. And we have developed a robust regulatory regime for CO2 storage.

My government has committed a further $335 million to a National Low Emissions Coal Initiative, under the direction of a council comprising government, industry and research representatives. And there are similar national and regional CCS research, development and demonstration programs around the world.