Is it crunch time for coal?

There are about a dozen carbon capture and storage projects under way around Australia, but no one can say for certain that it will work. Even if it is technically feasible on the huge scale required, the massive infrastructure involved could negate brown coal’s greatest advantage — its low cost.

And then there is the biggest problem of all — time.
Emissions trading starts in 2010, climate scientists say global emissions must be trending downwards by 2015, yet even the most heroic predictions say commercial-scale capture and storage won’t be ready until between 2015 and 2020. A recent report by Washington-based environmental think tank the World Resources Institute says a 20-to-50-year time scale is more realistic.

Even the most optimistic projections — with the method commercially deployed by 2020 — would leave a decade-long hole after the introduction of emissions trading during which the Latrobe Valley power stations would run at a loss.

Ferguson refuses to canvass possible Government assistance, such as free pollution permits, before the release of the Federal Government’s green paper due next month. “The last thing we can do is start trading sectors in and out on the way through. We’ll end up with a dog’s breakfast, and an incapacity to manage the outcome,” he says.

The Age