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September 5, 2009
Peter Beattie has come clean on the coal industry and climate change that is obscured by the Labor premiers of Queensland, NSW, Victoria and South Australia.Their rhetoric is about doing something good about climate change whilst defending the expansion of their coal industry and protecting their coal-fired power stations.
Beattie's preferred option to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has been, and still is "clean coal." That will help to protect Australia's coal export industry and ensure that it meets the rising energy demand for coal from China and India. In an op-ed The Australian Beattie says:
The clear and present danger for Australia's coal industry is, unless there is a powerful push to see clean-coal technology developed and implemented, the traditional markets for its product will start slowly shutting down as green energy becomes more price-competitive and public policy continues to demand greener outcomes. The coal industry needs to realise that there has to be a sense of urgency about delivering significant low-emission coal technology and carbon storage projects. Clean coal has to be an integral part of the world's clean-energy mix before it becomes a victim of heavy regulation and other technologies overtake it. The pace of change is faster than most people realise.
Well we knew that. Coal is an old industry. The new investment money is going into renewable energy---this is the pathway of energy innovation. It means no more coal fired power plants as being foreshadowed by some Labor premiers.
CO2 capture and storage is currently the only technological approach that shows promise for enabling Australia to continue to rely on its vast coal reserves to provide electricity while, at the same time, achieving sufficient carbon dioxide (CO2) emission reductions to address climate change. Where Beattie comes clean is at this point:
Too often the coal industry sees its advantages as being too strong to be ignored. These include the abundance of cheap coal against the expense of building new power stations, the cost of gas and solar, and the unreliability of wind and wave power. Lehman Brothers, the big American merchant bank, thought coal was too big to be ignored. That bank doesn't exist any more.
The Australian coal industry doesn't seem to be doing that much to become technologically innovative. Its strategy appears to be to capture the state, use its power to prevent the emergence of the renewable energy industry, ensuring that the state invests in developing the technology for cleaner coal, and ensuring a decades-long delay in the deployment of CCS. They are not talking about retrofitting coal-fueled power plants.
Beattie argues that what needs to be done, if the coal industry is to avoid becoming history, is for Australia's coal companies to increase their research and development investment in order to ensure a future for the Australian coal industry through carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Beattie recognizes is that a decade long delay will have serious negative impacts on coal’s ability to compete in the electric power sector under future climate-change policies.
Cleaning coal is very expensive, and Australia may not have the right geological conditions to support injecting carbon dioxide emissions into the ground rather than releasing them into the atmosphere. The Pew Centre on Climate Change reckons that a price of at least $25 to $30 per ton of CO2 would be needed to drive coal-based electric power plants to install CCS. The investment money required is estimated to be around $20-30 billion.
Looks like there will be an emerging energy mix of renewables and energy efficiency developing over the next decade.
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Peter should be scared. We
Queenslanders are utterly "coalpromized", denying the death of King Coal and hoping for a "pipe dream": 4 Corners will expose the myth of Clean Coal on Monday night.
Soon, we'll be left with nothing but worthless black rock, importing solar and other renewable technology from California, Germany, India and China.