Twenty one years ago, on this day, February 22nd, 2004, we were promised clean coal…
JUDGING by the heavy hitters attending a conference on the Gold Coast this week, geosequestration is about to get a substantial workover in Australia in the next few years.
Geosequestration is the capture of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and placing them underground. To some environmentalists the concept is about as popular as toxic waste.
For Australia’s biggest export industry, coal, geosequestration may be the difference between death and survival.
Wilson, N. 2004 Turning coal clean and green. The Australian, February 21.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 377ppm. As of 2025 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that interest in technological solutions to climate change – solutions is doing a lot of work in that sentence – were being promulgated especially by the Australians and Americans because they had not signed up to the Kyoto Protocol. The Australian coal industry was going along with the fantasy of “clean coal” – , at least rhetorically, but not putting any of their own money where their mouths were. They have the skills to deal with digging stuff up, solids and moving it from place to place. CCS is all about pipes and valves and so forth. I mean that you can overstate this. The coal industry does have some experience with these sorts of things, but not enough.
Also, the sums of money involved in making CCS “work” are staggering.
What I think we can learn from this is that people have been wittering about CCS loudly in public for a very long time. And we don’t have any CCS worthy of the name.
What happened next
The CCS bubble in Australia burst in 2010. Chevron did its ridiculous Gorgon plant, (signed off by one P. Garrett, then Federal Environment Minister) which has never met its promises. However, CCS is now currently having another “moment.”
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
References