“Failed gas fantasy:” CCS slammed as Labor issues permits for offshore “carbon dumping”

The Albanese government has been accused of propping up the “failed carbon dumping fantasies of gas executives,” after federal Labor announced that 10 permits for carbon capture and storage exploration were being finalised alongside new permits for offshore gas exploration.

Federal resources minister Madeleine King said on Tuesday that her department would finalise permits for Esso and Beach Energy in the Otway and Sorrell Basins, with any discovered gas to support the domestic east coast market.

At the same time, 10 permits will be finalised for offshore carbon capture and storage (CCS) exploration, which King says will be needed to support the net zero transition – a view the minister says is supported by the International Energy Agency, CSIRO and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

This claim is disputed, however, with skeptics arguing that CCS is an an unproven technology that is about as promising as nuclear fusion, and possibly just as farfetched to be practical, economic and on a scale that would make a difference.

“I challenge Minister King to point to a subsea carbon pollution dumping project that has reached commercial viability in Australia,” Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson said on Tuesday.

“Carbon pollution dumping is a sham and designed to do nothing more than greenwash and prolong our reliance on the same fossil fuels that when burnt are boiling our oceans and bleaching our Great Barrier Reef,” Whish-Wilson said.

“Billions of taxpayer dollars have already been wasted on the failed carbon dumping fantasies of gas executives,” said Greenpeace Australia Pacific head of climate and energy, Joe Rafalowicz.

“How many times do these projects need to fail before we see them for what they are – a distraction from the clean energy solutions we have available right now,”

The environmental consequences of CCS are equally untested. In May, the Queensland Labor government promised to ban carbon capture and storage in the Great Artesian Basin, a water source for 180,000 inland people with an estimated 65 million gigalitres.

The Miles government had already rejected the plans of coal giant Glencore to capture carbon dioxide, liquefy it and store it 2.3km underground, pumping more than 300,000 tonnes of wastewater into an aquifer as part of a three-year trial.

Glencore argued no damage would have been caused by injecting the waste product into the aquifer, a body of rock that holds groundwater. But the state environment department argued it would cause “irreversible” change to groundwater quality and environmental values.

“Just as farmers stopped carbon being dumped into the Great Artesian Basin poisoning our water supply, Australians won’t stand for oil companies burying their carbon pollution in our oceans,” said Rafalowicz, on Tuesday.

“Greedy fossil fuel companies, like Woodside, use every excuse under the sun to keep drilling our oceans for gas – even the magical ‘carbon dumping unicorn’ – but the future lies in proven renewables like wind and solar.”

“Allowing new carbon dumping permits is a step backwards for this government,” Rafalowicz adds, noting that the same Australian and international climate groups minister King cites in support of CCS have also declared there should be no new fossil fuel projects in a world going to net zero.

“The Albanese government should be setting out their timeline to implement the agreement they signed at COP28 to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems, not approving permits for new gas and throwing money at half-baked ideas that prolong it.” 

The Australian Marine Conservation Society notes that some of the CCS permits awarded on Tuesday are for Australia’s south-east waters, which are already suffering major impacts from climate change, warming three to four times faster than the global average. 

“These permits in the waters between Victoria and Tasmania are an affront to the tens of thousands of Australians who oppose the seismic blasting and test drilling proposals in the Otway Basin,” says AMCS oil and gas campaign manager Louise Morris.

“It’s a farce that the carbon dumping permits released today will allow companies such as Esso/ExxonMobil to repurpose rusting old rigs and infrastructure, which have had two reported leaks and spills just this year, for dumping carbon in Bass Strait.

“Esso/ExxonMobil currently has proposals to pump carbon pollution from its Longford gas plant in Gippsland under the ocean, as part of the SEA CCS project,” Morris adds.

“The Australian government has already spent more than $1 billion on carbon capture and storage, which has failed to deliver, and the Albanese government is planning to throw another estimated $140 million at this proven failure over the coming 10 years.”

Indeed, the federal budget handed down in May set aside $32 million to develop rules and international trade arrangements for carbon capture and storage (CCS).

And on Tuesday, Pilot Energy announced it has been awarded a $6.5 million federal government grant to support the Mid West Clean Energy Project, providing carbon capture services to the Mid West Region of Western Australia.

The grant, awarded by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, enables Pilot to progress engineering and technology demonstration activities across three sources of carbon with the initial potential to capture 200,000 – 300,000 tonnes of carbon per annum.

“It’s time the Albanese government stopped handing over our ocean to the fossil fuel industry to try and mine more gas, and dropped plans to dump carbon pollution under our ocean, endangering our marine life, marine parks, climate and coastal communities that will bear the brunt of any spills or leaks,” AMCS’s Morris says.

With additional reporting from AAP