Littleproud’s first comments as re-elected Nationals leader: Blackout disinformation

The first few weeks of the post-election shake-down are useful indicators of the tone politicians intend to take, and freshly re-installed Nationals leader David Littleproud kicked off the next term with something grim. When pressed on the position the party intends to take on emissions target, climate and renewables, Littleproud said this:

“You cannot run an economy of the industrial scale the size of Australia on an all-renewables approach, just look at Spain and Portugal … the reality is, even Anthony Albanese is saying your energy bill is going to up”.

It’s a reference to nuclear power – but as I discovered soon after the blackout, Spain hasn’t ditched nuclear power at all. In fact, as I wrote in this post, Spain’s installed capacity of nuclear has barely shifted over the past thirty years.

And the country’s nuclear power plants had lower than 50% availability at the time of the blackout, for confusing and contradictory reasons. From what I could see, Spanish nuclear hadn’t had a lower generation month than April 2025.

We still don’t know what triggered the cascade on Spain’s power grid, or what made that cascade worse. There’s a good chance solar, wind hydro, nuclear, gas and coal were all involved in different ways, and we’ll find out soon enough. But making conclusions about the mix of energy types on power grids from blackouts is surely something Australian politicians should have learned by now not to do.

Littleproud’s CCS disinformation

David Littleproud has form in betting on the wrong horse. Prior to the election, Nationals leader David Littleproud told ABC News that:

“If we’re going to export, there are technologies around the world that have been adopted for coal-fired power stations. It’s called carbon capture storage. In fact we have it here in Australia as well – the gas industry, and it’s cheap at the moment for the gas industry to be able to do that. And that’s a technology that reduces emissions to zero. If we’re getting back to first principles, which is to reduce emissions, which we all agree on, then why wouldn’t we look at all the technology that is available?”

Littleproud is remarkably wrong on a variety of points in a short stretch of time. A recent study by some folks here in Norway recently showed that coal-fired power CCS has a failure rate of about 98% – that is, nearly every single planned project failed to materialise:

Also blatantly wrong is Littleproud’s claim that CCS reduces emissions to ‘zero’. Carbon capture technologies that operate at the point of emissions (‘point source’) capture some percentage of carbon dioxide being dumped into the atmosphere.

A recent study by IEEFA laid out that not only are emissions not zero at these plants, they are mostly performing wildly under the promised rate of about 95% of emissions captured.

For my annual update on CCS, I showed that Chevron’s notorious Gorgon carbon capture project saw its worst ever performance for 2023-24, and that “of the 5.3 megatonnes it removed to be injected underground in 2023-24, only 1.6 actually ended up underground.

The rest? Vented into the atmosphere. Since it began operation seven years ago, two thirds of all of the carbon dioxide ‘removed for injection’ has been pumped into the planet’s atmosphere”.

This is all part of the marketing tactics for expanding the fossil fuel industry, and it is likely we’ll see more of this type of deception. With the new leader of the coalition set to be announced today, we’ll get a clearer picture of the opposition’s tone and approach on climate and energy. I am not hopeful.