Plan To Bury Greenhouse Gas Stirs Uproar

by Bob Burton

(IPS) CANBERRA -- To the dismay of environmentalists, the Australian government has succeeded in enlisting a large U.S. environmental group to support a controversial research program to bury greenhouse gases underground as a solution to climate change.

Support for carbon capture and storage could be one way of persuading the powerful fossil fuel lobby to end its opposition to preventing global warming, says David Hawkins, the director of Climate Centre for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

"What we are exploring is whether political power that is represented by the fossil energy industry can actually be used to move the process forward rather than have them in their traditional role of opposing action," he said.

For the last week, Hawkins has been speaking at conferences around Australia on the potential merits of converting coal into gas, burning the useful components in gas power stations and pumping captured carbon dioxide into underground reservoirs.

Hawkins -- who spent fours years as an Environmental Protection Agency administrator advising former U.S. President Jimmy Carter -- sees his support for carbon capture and storage as a pragmatic response to the hardline policies of the U.S. and Australian governments. "Both governments see it as a way of dealing with the politics of coal use and it does have that potential," he said.

Australian Greens Sen Bob Brown thinks that Hawkins is heading in the wrong direction. "It just seems politically bizarre to say that you have to get into bed with the big fossil fuel lobby and that we have to help them out rather than throwing our weight behind the emerging industries in renewable energy," he said.

In the dying hours of the last negotiating conference on the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, lobbying by the Australian government resulted in it extracting astonishing concessions. Where other countries would be required to cut their emissions to levels lower than their 1990 contributions, Australia's target was set at eight percent higher.

In Australia, coal-fired electricity accounts for 35 percent of the total emission, and the aluminium industry alone consuming 15 percent of Australia's entire production. However, the coal, power generation and aluminium industries viewed meeting the target as too expensive and succeeded in persuading Prime Minister John Howard to reject the Kyoto Protocol.

Instead of reducing Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by aggressively promoting energy efficiency and renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power, the government has switched its focus to burying carbon dioxide. While the technology is largely untested and, by most estimates, more expensive than renewables and energy efficiency, it has the advantage for the coal and aluminium industries of avoiding constraints on their production rates.

On July 1, 2003, the Australian government established a Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies with a budget of $153 million over seven years -- to investigate options for carbon capture.

"The producers of fossil fuels have much to gain if capture and storage technologies can provide a more sustainable future for fossil fuels in Australia and internationally,'' the centre, known as CO2CRC, explains in a background document.

Some of the world's largest fossil-fuel companies -- BP, Rio Tinto, ChevronTexaco, Shell, BHP-Billiton and Woodside Petroleum -- have all become formal supporters of the centre's research projects.

For the large energy corporations, the successful development of burying carbon could help reduce legal and financial risks of being massive contributors to climate change. "CO2CRC research will decrease the exposure of major energy producing or intensive projects to financial risk from, for example, the future application of a carbon trading regime, or customer resistance to major CO2 emitters, or liability for the perceived consequences of climate change," the research centre states.

"I think that if in fact the industry wants to be taken seriously, it is going to have to say that global warming is a problem, that these actions can solve it and if they do that, that will change the political landscape. If they don't do that you won't see NRDC retaining an interest in this approach," Hawkins said.

While environmental groups oppose underground storage as an unproven approach, the research has the enthusiastic support of Robin Batterham, the managing director of research and technological development for Rio Tinto, one of the world's largest mining companies. Based on figures for 2002, Rio Tinto alone accounts for 5 percent of Australia's entire greenhouse gas emissions.

While Batterham works three days a week for Rio Tinto, he also works two days a week as chief scientific adviser to the prime minister, including on energy policy issues. It is a potential conflict that Brown argues is unacceptable. "He has to choose one job or the other," he said.

In a recent submission to the government, Rio Tinto dismissed the role of government support for the development of renewable energy technologies. Instead, it insisted that carbon capture and storage is "a promising prospect."

Hawkins too supports urgently researching and testing the possibilities of underground carbon storage. "The Australian government has explicitly said that it is linking its willingness to commit to solving global warming to some proof that this approach works and what it will cost. This creates a wait and see attitude in the private sector that we can't afford," Hawkins said.

Brown thinks that Hawkins' support for the technology is misplaced. "What he's asking for is a kind of Manhattan Project approach to geo-sequestration, which if it was applied to energy efficiency and renewables would have as great or greater effect," he said.