Governments

How much has Australia spent on CCS, and what has been achieved?

Published by

Quora.

About 200,000 tons of CO2 has been captured and sequestered in CCA project for power generation at a cost of over $A1 billion since 1998 in various schemes. The cost per tonne sequestered was about $4,300 AUD.

That’s a ratio of one to 38,000 of the CO2 sequestered vs the roughly 9 billion tons of CO2 emitted by Australia since CCS technologies started being investigated. It’s a ratio of about one to 2,300 of the 549 million tons of CO2 emitted by Australia last year alone.

Here are the various carbon capture, distribution and sequestration efforts made in Australia since 1998. Exactly two sequestered some CO2.

About $700 million of this was funded by the Australian government and $300 million by the industry itself, so the coal industry isn’t even paying its own portion of this failure. Australia continues to put lipstick on the pig of CCS with its Coal21 Fund, a tiny pittance of research dollars annually intended to provide air cover for the emissions of the coal industry.

Michael Barnard is a regularly published low-carbon innovation analyst. Source: Quora. Reproduced with permission.

Recent Posts

Australia’s biggest coal state breaks new ground in wind and solar output

New South Wales has reached two remarkable renewable energy milestones that signal the growing contribution…

6 January 2025

New Year begins with more solar records, as PV takes bigger bite out of coal’s holiday lunch

As 2025 begins, Victoria is already making its mark on the energy landscape with a…

3 January 2025

What comes after microgrids? Energy parks based around wind, solar and storage

Co-locating renewable generation, load and storage offers substantial benefits, particularly for manufacturing facilities and data…

31 December 2024

This talk of nuclear is a waste of time: Wind, solar and firming can clearly do the job

Australia’s economic future would be at risk if we stop wind and solar to build…

30 December 2024

Build it and they will come: Transmission is key, but LNP make it harder and costlier

Transmission remains the fundamental building block to decarbonising the grid. But the LNP is making…

23 December 2024

Snowy Hunter gas project hit by more delays and blowouts, with total cost now more than $2 billion

Snowy blames bad weather for yet more delays to controversial Hunter gas project, now expected…

23 December 2024