"Australia has significant raw resource availability, it drives the nation’s economy, but who would have imagined, in the face of peak oil and the damaging effects of fossil fuels, the Victorian government would be entering a minerals extraction boom with a major focus on coal."

Who would have imagined? Erm, I would have. And just about every other person in the country would have if they'd thought about it for more than five seconds.

I mean, does anyone really think that the Vic Govt is anywhere near seriously addressing climate change or steering away from fossil fuel exploitation and towards a sustainably energy regime and society??

Queensland is just as bad when it comes to coal. And every state is just as bad when it comes to ignoring the sustainability imperative.

Worst of all is our Prime Minister, with his unbelievable 'big Australia' policy direction, fed by the greatest population growth rate that this country has ever seen...by far!

"... not only is Australia spending $7 billion a year in signing the Global Warming Treaty (money that is to be passed on to countries such as China and Bangladesh to offset adaptation to climate change in developing countries) but could also be faced with enormous fines - “10 times the market price of carbon” - if the governments’ green policies do not meet the UN expectations"

While on the face of it our Government is indulging in self-destructive insanity there is some method to this madness.

Appeasement is what counts. If rich Australia can pay homage (protection money) to poor China (the world's third richest country by many measures) Australia can:

- return to China some of the profits that China sees us making from overly high coal and iron prices (a la Hu detention); and

- cross subsidize China's huge spending on its military machine particularly nuclear weapons fueled more easily as an end product of Australian supplied uranium.

And coal sequestration? A great idea:

- justifies use of the dirtiest carbon chewer (brown coal) in Australia today

- justifies our profitable coal trade without guilt or thought

- uncosted, untested on practicle industrial scale

- all geared to dubious new carbon credit tax broking schemes

- begging for natural calamities (we know how these once in 100 or 1,000 year events come up ever more frequently these days):

- and, in the end, we get to pay much higher electricity bills to fund this Green Big End of Town extravaganza.

Move to France, 70+% CLEAN nuclear generated electricity, before its too late.

Pete

It's clear that the Victorian government has no intention of cutting back on brown coal, they even want to export it. The Federal government is either gullible or stupid and has shown itself equally incapable of reducing coal emissions. Evidence is the 90% free permit holiday under the ETS and seriously entertaining TRU Energy's outrageous blackmail claim for compensation. Mind you the Feds have taken over payments for asbestos compensation by James Hardie so there is a precedent.

With CCS I'd rank the issues in order as
1) can enough underground storage space be found?
2) is that storage space secure?
3) what CO2 price makes it economically viable?
The densest form of CO2 turns out to be the gas phase at near room temperature and pressure at about 2 tonnes per cubic metre. For Hazelwood quality coal a cubic metre creates over a tonne of CO2 when burned as the heavier oxygen atoms attach to the carbon. Another quarter cubic metre will need to be burned to power the chemical scrubbers and pumps. That 1-2 tonnes of CO2 will need about another cubic metre of storage space. Thus a kind of 'negative' Latrobe valley will be needed just to store the CO2. For Australia as a whole it is reckoned half a million cubic metres of undergound storage space will need to be found every day for the next 200 years or whatever. So the answer to Q1 looks like 'no'. The answers to Q's 2 and 3 will have to wait for another day.

In short the governments are in cahoots with the coal industry and are trying to deceive the public with stalling tactics.

Totally agree, we should stop mining and selling coal - if, we can create "Green Jobs" developing and selling Nuclear Technology.

So we could become the world's leader in multiple generation Nuclear Power sources if we get onto it now before the rest of the herd and get a head start.

We can replace our dependency on coal for electricity, power all the desalination plants since the eco warriors won't allow any dams to be built, and power our economy.

You can't possibly want to just stop using coal fired electricity can you, without replacing it? What do we tell our children about killing off their chances for a modern future if we have no electricity and have decided to go the Wong way and stop coal fired electricity production.

Wind, thermal solar, nice ideas, but hardly mature enough to power a city are they? They are all still in the hobby domain, in 50 years, they might be mature enough, but right now - only Nuclear can provide us a future.

The Vic government needs money to pay for all the various bandaid solutions to green policies, like no dams, like no new electricity plants, like no freeways .. so why not sell coal, there's no law against it and if you are waiting for moral stances from the ALP (or Coalition), don't hold your breath. Politics is short term, you don't want to do something you won't reap the benefits of.

Like Pete says, Move to France, or have the benefits of what France has here! (unless we're Caldicotted that is)

Well said Chris. I would just quibble with "Coal sequestration is the new technology ...". It is not a "new" technology, it is a potential future technology.

CCS is in fact the most conjectural of the main options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The vast quantities potentially involved make it almost laughable that anyone would consider it. The Earth's crust is very messy, riddled with faults. Whenever oil companies pump oil out or water in they a liable to trigger small earthquakes, just as big dams trigger earthquakes. And so on.

I think CCS needs to be labelled as a big con, a tactic merely to delay the inevitable decline of the coal industry.

I'm pleasantly surprised to see positive comments so far, though predictably your post is attracting pro-nuclear enthusiasts. Good luck to them but nuclear is also in the future, costly and with many attendant risks, despite so-called "third" and "fourth" generation schemes. The option that would allow us to see emissions declining from tomorrow, that would be much cheaper, and that has multiple spinoff benefits instead of multiple spinoff problems, is radical energy efficiency. See
http://betternature.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/cut-emissions-and-boost-economy/
and other posts on that site. With a transforming economy, other energy sources become much more feasible.

"The science on coal sequestration presents as very impressive from the computer generated modelling but what do we really know ..?"

A climate changer casting aspersions on computer modelling.

To quote James Ellroy: "I will not comment on the attendant irony."

“Are politicians and business serious about effectively addressing climate change?”

That’s an easy one. Of course they are not serious. Politicians (both sides) are not serious about climate change when they continue to talk about high population growth. Rudd and cronies are not serious about climate change with their manic urge to install a tax system which will do nothing to stop emissions, but will certainly transfer wealth from Australia to backward countries with despots who will use the money (laughingly called carbon credits) to erect more palaces and monuments to themselves – while the Australian economy goes down the gurgler.

Prof. Barry Brook, chair of Climate Change at Adelaide University, and Access Economics both have schemes that would be much more effective and much cheaper than the Rudd Tax, but Rudd is just not interested. Brook even believes in the CO2 theory, but he decries Rudds tax on the Australian economy. Turnbull is a wimp whose limp amendments would not alter the silly scheme much even if they were accepted.

As for coal, clean or otherwise, it’s going to be a long, long time before we can do without it. Despite the chattering of the Greens etc, there is no base-load energy source available; nor will there be in the foreseeable future. Unless, of course, Australia decides to go nuclear: which would solve most of the problems.

But our pig-headed, ignorant government (and opposition, it now seems) is hell-bent on ruining Australia with a stupid and immense taxation scheme which will reduce Australia to a Third World country

"Coal sequestration is the new technology being used for extracting the harmful C02 from coal, ...The carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses are to be injected into the earth’s cavities, some of which lay in strategically unstable and ecologically sensitive environments... This is because they already have the vacuous channels required in the form of aquifers or old mine shafts."

In geosequestration CO2 is injected into stable porous rock, not old mine shafts. Similarly CO2 is not extracted from coal but separated from the waste gases of power stations etc.

If you want to know more about how the technology actually works there is plenty of good info on the web.

Scientists have known for decades that CO2 was going to cause climate change, and it has taken that long for the public and politicians to become aware of the problem.

Similarily, the evidence is clear that nuclear power is the safest and most applicable technology available to provide a stable reliable alternative to coal.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf06.html

Is it really going to take another couple of decades before the public and politicians realise that there is only so far one can go with renewables, CCS, efficiency etc?

Have we just swapped climate skeptics for nuclear skeptics?

As the increase in power demand continues to outstrip the increase in renewable power, it is not surprising that coal consumption is still increasing.

The way we are going, we will hit 2020 with increased emissions, and as Rudd has suggested, we will be setting an example to the rest of the world, but not the one he intended.

Shadow Minister

"Have we just swapped climate skeptics for nuclear skeptics?"

I would have thought most climate skeptics were in favour of Nuclear Power, and most AGW believers against it .. even though you would expect AGW believers should be rabidly in favor of it, since it is the most eco friendly power generating solution.

Coal generates jobs as well as power, but it looks like the "wuckers" don't seem to be getting that. I'm surprised they are just rolling with the whole eco "get rid of coal" thing, that's their jobs, futures, mortgage payments - why are they not worried, what do they know that we don't?

We are destroying the planet, there isn't going to be anything left for our grandchildren, we are going to see an increase in natural disasters, cyclones, floods, droughts, storms, tornados, and earthquakes, and it's all because of the wickedness of mankind's greed, all the fertile areas of the world are going to turn into deserts and species are becoming extinct at an alarming rate. We need to tax cows for farting, control brown coal, and we need to stop burning fossil fuels, by taking money from productive activities (which are evil because human beings are noxious pests), and put it into covering every inch of the world with solar panels and wind farms, while making it compulsory to have rain-water tanks, keep out foreigners, be self-sufficient and await the apocalypse. Everybody needs to stop consuming so much, and if a large number of people were to die, who could say that would be such a bad thing? Somebody else that is, not me, I mean. We all need to use dim light bulbs otherwise the world will dematerialise because of our sin. All human beings should be shot because they are bad for the environment. The government should fix everything.

Don't laugh. This is the mental level of the snivelling morons behind this imbecile crapola. They are merely a re-run of the religious apocalyptics that appear throughout history, the sack-cloth-and-ashes brigade of Biblical times, the self-flagellating ostentatious of the middle ages, the pious puritans of the 1600s, the utopian socialists of the 20th century. If they were just painfully preening and vain, it wouldn't be so bad, but they insist on imposing their destructive delusion on the entire world's productive activities, and neither know nor care what the costs in human suffering will be.

<<and neither know nor care what the costs in human suffering will be.>>

This statement applies far more to the deniers than the supporters of climate change.

Ah Peter, you have hit the coal nail on the coal head.

The bearded gnomes are the screwed up face of mental constipation. Wouldn't you love to invited to one of their parties?

I'm afraid Dr Chris knows bugger all about coal sequestration but I admire her for having the guts to come out and say she doesn't want the bloody thing near her house!

I'm going gung ho for tidal waves, bushfires and nuclear reactors - anything to stop us from living in the medieval world these enviro-nutters want to create.

Me thinks that alot of the CO2 from power stations, will very
possibly be used to grow algae on a large scale, with a win-win
outcome all round.

I read somewhere that it would take around 50 square km of
farmed algae, to supply all of Australia's liquid energy
needs. So some serious work is going on in the field.

Algae are such simple life forms, highly efficient at
harvesting energy and multiplying themselves rapidly,
some with 50% oil content.

But they need large amounts of CO2 to grow. The very
best source is a coal fired power station.

The Americans did alot of research on this stuff in
the 90s, but gave it away when the price of oil sank
back to 10$ at the time. Its all being cranked up
again, including in Australia.

Not only that, but when the oil is extracted, the residues
make great stock feed.

Chris,
Lots of assumptions and selected naivety in this piece, as with the whole CO2 sequestration technology.
In short a very uninformative piece of prose. It adds nothing to an important debate only gives a platform for more of the same. Trivial and pointless. I hope your lectures have more substance.

SM

I am on a quest to read more about the Chinese idea of nuclear power i.e. no meltdown pebble nuke technology. on the surface it seems like an option worth more consideration.
( on "addicted to money" show last night)
Any comments and or sources?

Examinator,

To put what I say in perspective, I need to define the difference between inherently safe and intrinsically safe.

A crude comparison would be if you had a ball on top of a hill, and put measures in place to ensure it never rolled down, this would be inherently safe, in that the event of rolling down the hill would be extremely unlikely.

If the ball were at the bottom of the hill it would not tend to roll away, and even if all restraints were removed, it would stay put. It would then be intrinsically safe.

The reactors of today are inherently safe in that multiple redundant systems are in place to ensure that an incident does not occur, but in the unlikely event of all the safeties failing, an event can occur.

There are several designs for smaller systems that can be built which are intrinsically safe (less than 100MW), i.e. a terrorist could bomb the place, and knock out every safety system, and shortly afterwards you could sit down for lunch next to the reactor with no harm.

The added advantage is that for a factory that burns gas for heat, the waste heat from generation can be used instead of sending it into the sky via cooling towers. This saves not only the coal but the gas for heating too.

Also for small towns mini power plants (1-10MW) could be built in a truckable package, buried, supply power for about 40 years, and then exhumed, loaded back on a truck and returned for reprocessing.

The major flaw in this scenario, is that public perception of these small units is the same as if one built a 3 GW giant, and the effort and money required to get approval one of these mini units is nearly the same as one of the giants.

I have been fan of these intrinsically safe mini nuke systems for many years, but I don't see it happenning until nuclear power is common place in a couple of decades.

I would like to add another perspective. We are running out of oil. That also means we are running out of the means to manufacture industrial chemicals, and that of course includes plastics. Coal is also a source of chemicals and was so when I was young. We also forget that coal is used in making steel.

Personally I think we could have a much stronger effort in energy demand reduction and that, coupled with large scale solar thermal (and yes storage does work [operational in Spain] in case we get the usual opposite view) we would be working towards a solution. It needs investment certainty.

Coal could then be transitioned to industrial chemicals.

As for carbon dioxide as a means of growing algae, its not so easy but a project was started in the La Trobe Valley at the Hazelwood plant about 10 years ago.

Everyone seems to be focussing on Australia only, when there is an abundance of coal, supporting many economies, in countries around the world. Surely an investment in CCS is worthwhile to attack the global problem?

Why has everyone got such NIMBY (Not in my backyard) syndrome? I can't understand why people don't support development of a technology that could change the world, rather than just their own patch?