Climate policy in Aus

Climate policy affects us all, especially when it’s BS!!!

Last month I took advantage of a short break between jobs to look into Australia’s “vision” regarding investment in low emission technologies. You can access the original government doc (called Roadmap) here.

Now I would like to think my general BS-detector is fairly fine tuned, but to get it extra sharp I teamed up with my good mate Charlie Brigden, who holds a Masters degree from the The Association of European Union Renewable Energy Centres. We wrote a short submission about this, which you can find here.

In the submission we tried to cover the points quickly and were pretty careful about bolstering our arguments with references. As a result it is pretty dry. Below I give a more colorful summary.

After you weed out the painful self-congratulations and blatant bias in the document, you see the government is looking at spending our money in three areas - Hydrogen, gas and carbon capture and storage.

Hydrogen is number 1 on the elements table, light, abundant and a high energy density to boot. As a fuel, it has the potential to only produce water vapor as an emission, making it a cleaner alternative than fossil fuels. There are two factors to consider with Hydrogen - where is it sourced from and what energy is used to produce it. You basically get hydrogen from water or hydrocarbons. When sourced from water, the only byproduct is oxygen, great! When you remove the hydrogen from hydrocarbons, it leaves the carbon, not so great. Now the energy can come from either renewables or fossil fuels. Obviously producing hydrogen from renewables makes sense - after all the point is lowering emissions. This could also be lucrative for Australia, by exporting this renewable-made hydrogen to countries interested in lowering their own emissions. Unfortunately it is not at all clear that renewable-made hydrogen is where the investment will be going. In particular, in the paper they talk about pushing for “h2 under $2” (kilo of hydrogen for under two AUD), but turns out we could do this fairly soon if we use fossils to do it. So how do you use fossil fuels to produce hydrogen while still lowering emissions? Simple - you bury the emissions. This is what carbon capture and storage is about.

Carbon capture and storage is a fundamentally reactive approach to the emissions problem. It is aimed at “fixing” the inherent limitations of existing technologies rather than investing in eliminating the problem. The discussion paper tells us that carbon capture and storage is a “proven” technology. BS. First if it’s already “proven” then why the justification of investment? Second, well, it is not proven. For one, the discussion paper itself places this tech as less commercially-ready than, say, battery storage. More importantly, when you bury crap under the ground there is the chance that it’d float back up, something we won’t know for decades down the track, nor do we have the regulatory framework to penalize would-be offenders. Going with carbon capture and storage means taking the risk that emissions might escape down the track, a BS risk when we have carbon free options available.

Gas is a fossil fuel. Sure, it produces less emissions than coal, but it still produces a lot of emissions. In the discussion paper the justification for investing in gas is that we would need something when the wind doesn’t blow and when the sun doesn’t shine. BS. First, it’s established technology. We do not need to invest public money to figure out how to do it. Western Australia already has around half its power coming from gas. Second, there are better alternatives for shoring up renewables. Batteries and pumped hydro offer the best promise in this (carbon abatement) regard. The massive potential of these techs is made clear in the paper - yet these are not prioritized. Why? Keep in mind that firming of renewables becomes an issue when you have a very high level of renewable uptake in the first place. We are not there, and nothing about the document suggests we will invest to get there. Odd to invest in gas to mitigate the consequence of a scenario you are not working towards in the first place.

Climate policy in Australia is an intensely political issue. The current government approach is “technology not taxes”, which is BS. If you are going to make money from the detriment rather than the benefit of the broader, in this case global, community, then it makes sense you pay more tax. Setting clear goals for where Australia wants to be, for example zero emissions by 2050, and working with markets to find cost effective ways to get there is the better approach in my view.

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