NEW coal-fired power stations in Australia are inevitable and proposals to bury carbon dioxide emissions deep underground are essential if the country it is to tackle climate change, federal Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson says. Facing wild weather conditions in Victoria's rural southwest yesterday, including winds of over 100km an hour and dust storms to the north, Mr Ferguson launched the world's first scientific demonstration of so-called carbon sequestration.

This involves pumping near-liquid carbon dioxide underground for permanent storage in geological formations such as dry oil and gas reservoirs. But the weather was so bad yesterday that power lines were blown down and power to the plant was cut, delaying the start-up of CO2 injection.

The largely government-funded $40 million testing plant near Nirranda will pump carbon dioxide from a naturally occurring reservoir and then compress the gas and inject it 2km underground into an old oil and gas reservoir. The CO2 will then be monitored for two years to assess the risk of leakages and the potential for the gas to corrode the porous rock that would house it beneath a layer of impermeable rock. Nearby natural CO2 reservoirs are currently used as a source of CO2 to carbonate soft drinks.

In all, about 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide will be pumped deep beneath the surrounding paddocks and monitored for two years. This is a key step in demonstrating the process and attempting to win over public support for a technology, which, if rolled out nationally, would require a mammoth pipe network to ferry carbon dioxide from coal power stations to geological storage sites hundreds of kilometres away. In all, Australia emits about 400 million tonnes of CO2 a year.

There are proposals to store that gas in geological formation in Victoria, in and offshore the Gippland Basin, in Queensland's Bowen Basin, South Australia's Cooper Basin and offshore Western Australia. But the nearest site to the NSW coastal population centres are about 500km away, unless a site can be found offshore in the Sydney Basin.

Geosequestration technology isn't new. In the US and in Europe's North Sea carbon dioxide is injected into oil and gas reservoirs to increase the flow of oil and gas to the surface.

But this is the first scientific demonstration of using the technology just to store CO2. With the world, especially China and India, expected to remain largely dependent on fossil fuels in the medium term at least, the International Energy Agency has identified geosequestration as the second most viable option for significantly cutting emission behind increased energy efficiency.

Australia sources about 80 per cent of its electricity from coal. "We must succeed on this front because Australia as a nation is heavily dependent on fossil fuels for energy," Mr Ferguson said. "Clearly there will be growth in renewables but we are a fossil fuel dependent economy and our major export is coal. In my opinion, we'll see at some point in the future new coal-based power stations in Australia. There is no alternative," the Minister said.

He plans to introduce legislation to Parliament before the end of the year to set the regulatory framework for storing CO2 offshore and is working with the states to establish similar onshore legislation. Mr Ferguson's comments will please the coal and gas industries, which are big supporters of the technology. BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, BP, Woodside and Shell are all supporting the Nirranda project and were present at the launch.

But the plan has been criticised by some environmental groups for putting new investment into fossil fuels when efforts should be concentrated on developing renewable technologies. There is also the risk that in the longer term it will be made redundant by developments in nuclear, hydrogen and solar power.

But Peter Cook, who has overseen the Nirranda project, believes geosequestration is critical for achieving near-term emission cuts. "We really need to be doing this at scale within the next 10 years, and preferably sooner," Dr Cook said. "We aren't talking about 2025. In my opinion that would be too late for this technology. The world would have moved on and the concentration of gases in the atmosphere will have increased enormously."

Dr Cook is head of the Co-operative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies.

(The Australian, 05/04/2008)