Nineteen years ago, on this day, March 17th, 2006,
Australia has the opportunity and responsibility to explore emissions-reduction technologies, writes Grant Thorne.
Thorne, G. (2006) Carbon capture the key to cutting greenhouse gases. The Australian Financial Review, March 17.
“Grant Thorne. Grant Thorne is managing director of Rio Tinto Coal Australia, a major Australian coal producer.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 382ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that over the previous couple of years, there had been increased talk about CCS in Australia – Coal 21 national plans and Zero Emissions conferences, especially in Queensland. And it was obvious – or it seemed obvious – that there would be international negotiations to create a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. And so everyone was banging on about CCS.
What I think we can learn from this is that it’s all just kayfabe. And also, even if they were serious and it worked perfectly, CCS would be a terrifyingly small proportion of overall emissions. And CCS is essentially a way of not talking about reducing energy throughputs in affluent/effluent societies.
What happened next
By 2009/2010 reality had caught up with CCS in Australia, at least on that occasion. Since then, people have tried to paint Gorgon (given its approval by Labor Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett in 2009) as a success. It isn’t, except insofar as it enables some people not to talk about the need for energy reductions.
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.
Eighteen years ago, on this day, March 13th, 2007,
Australia’s coal and power generation industries must shoulder a large part of the cost of developing clean coal technologies, investing ”billions not millions” to mitigate climate change, ACTU secretary Greg Combet says. ”We are talking about companies that make multibillion-dollar profits from coal mining. It is only fair that a slice of those profits be directed to the research and development needed to substantially reduce greenhouse emissions,” he said. Speaking from the Hunter Valley, where he was launching a clean coal discussion paper with Opposition environment spokesman Peter Garrett, Mr Combet called for the Federal Government’s Minimum Renewable Energy Target for green electricity generation to be boosted.
Beeby, R. 2007. Put power profits into clean energy: Combet. Canberra Times, 13 March.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 384ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the ALP, in opposition federally, was using climate as a big stick to beat Prime Minister John Howard with. It had the added advantage of squaring the circle of their support for coal miners and coal mining; they needed something like geosequestration, CCS. So here we have Greg Combet, who would end up as Gillard’s Environment Minister, but that’s for the future, spouting guff about “the industry has to do X or Y,” and this is the classic triangulating position of seeming to be a friend of the worker and chiding industry bosses. It’s all nice theater.
What I think we can learn from this that CCS is an extremely useful way of squaring various circles.
But I think we’re now entering the world of nobody really bothering to pretend. We’re into the unmitigated disaster phase of it all.
What happened next Rudd bunged 100 million of Australian taxpayers dollars at a Global Carbon Capture and Storage Initiative. So, money well spent.
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.
Last Tuesday and Wednesday the Royal Courts of Justice heard an appeal in a case about whether the Government broke the law in approving a power-station-with-carbon-capture-and-storage project. The heart of the matter is the amount of emissions that will still be released. The appeal has been brought by environmental consultant Dr Andrew Boswell. Here he talks to AOY. The transcript has been very lightly edited for clarity. Next week, a detailed account of the numbers behind the appeal.
And so first question is, for people who are not familiar with yourself, your life in a couple of 100 words
Andrew Boswell 0:49
My life in a couple of hundred words? Well, currently, what I’ve been doing the last few years is challenging government decisions on projects which have an impact on the climate change, basically when they have a significant impact. Whether, basically whether the government is making a decision to approve these projects in a lawful way. So it’s largely looking at things like Environmental Impact Assessments and whether they are actually working out right, secondly, then whether they they [the government of the day] make a decision which is right with the law,
marc hudson 1:34
And why did you decide that this was a good use of your time and expertise, as opposed to other forms of environmental activism that in theory, you could be doing?
Andrew Boswell 1:47
Yeah, well, I saw a particular niche for myself, both as a scientist, so I could sort of review environmental impact assessments on the technical side, but also a realisation that the legal system wasn’t actually securing the Climate Change Act [of 2008] and our climate targets. I mean, I personally think we need much more radical carbon budgets and targets along the lines of Kevin Anderson might say; reductions of several percent a year, lots of percent a year, to meet the temperature targets. But we’re stuck with what we have under the Climate Change Act. And what we have is that not even those targets are being secured in planning decisions and by the planning system and by the legal system. So I set out to really sort of highlight that,
marc hudson 2:46
And we’ll talk briefly in general terms about the case that was being heard yesterday and today. But could you give us an example of a case where you forced the government to obey the laws, which, ironically, you know, it should be doing under the 2008 Climate Act.
Andrew Boswell 3:07
Well, the case today is a case in point. We don’t know the outcome of it, But my work is not just going into the courts, it’s actually going through the whole planning examination. And what did happen in that case is that initially the upstream emissions from the natural gas, which is largely methane emissions, were not initially put into the environmental impact assessment. So they [BP and Equinor] weren’t even trying to declare them. Then what happened was they did declare them, because I called that out in the planning examination. But then they actually went and miscalculated the whole thing. And what they did was they double-counted the carbon capture emissions. So effectively, they sort of said, “Oh, the carbon capture emissions, 180% of the carbon which would be going up the smoke stack” rather than 90% which is what they’re saying they capture. They effectively calculated 180% which then they were able to hide the methane emissions under.
So there’s a lot of deception going on. And over the course of six months, exchange of letters with the department and the government, eventually the government agreed with me that they had double counted. It’s notable to say that BP and Equinor when they had the facts laid out very simply before then, still denied that’s what they were doing.
Just to elaborate on that, do you understand that it actually took me three days to find the double-counting error because it was distributed around about half a dozen documents. And I actually had to create spreadsheets to understand what all the spreadsheets and the documents were doing; how the numbers interrelated. When I found the double-counting error, I thought, “no, they can’t really be doing that.” But eventually I convinced myself they were. And then I managed to lay it out in one half page spreadsheet, which actually went into the decision letter with the Secretary of State. And the Secretary of State, saying yes, they agreed with me that there was a double- counting error, but there was a long road to get to that simple explanation.
But even when I laid that out in front of BP and Equinor they still went on denying to the government that they ever made a double-counting error
marc hudson 5:51
On a recent Zoom call… I saw you lay out some of the details of this case. And you also said something that I think was very interesting and important that I would like you to expand on, which is that… you saw a case for CCS, for some purposes, eg, some industrial processes, cement, as opposed to what we’re getting, which is the energy production.
And I suppose my question is, how are we going to get or how could we get the CCS infrastructure and the CCS expertise and the CCS business models for the capture of emissions from, say, cement and ceramics and some chemical processes without the big oil companies having been able to develop it for power generation. Is that even possible, do you think that?
Andrew Boswell 7:12
Yeah, this is why I said that there is a case that it could be used for cement. But I didn’t say it was a proven case. And I think this is what needs to happen. And part of the problem in the UK is that they tried to do various what you might call stand-alone CCS projects, and those all failed. And one of the reasons they failed was we can’t get to all infrastructure to join up for one project – you can’t justify a storage site. And I get that, and that is a real issue. But then the response to that was, “well, okay, we’ll build this cluster model.” And each cluster basically starts off by having something driven by natural gas. It’s either blue hydrogen or it’s gas fired power, as in the Net Zero Teesside. So what you get is to start the thing up, and that’s the thing which is then going to sort of pump the CO2 down under the sea. You lock into natural gas.
But not only do you lock in, you front load all the emissions in this cluster model, because the big emissions come from the gas-fired power station, the natural gas supply and the methane in supply chain. You lock all those in; your cement plant might come along 10 years later, by which time you’ve done huge damage with the methane emissions in the first place.
So the question – and I think what your question is – is given that, can you now go back to actually a model where you could develop CCS for things like cement and lime, but you don’t rely on this cluster model, and you don’t rely on having a gas-fired power station to pump the stuff under the sea. And that’s why I think the case is not proven. We need to understand whether that can be done or not. And I don’t have a view on that, but I think what I think does need to be solved is the power to pump the stuff under the sea is one thing, and that could be done by renewables. The power for the Net Zero Teesside of it was about 50 megawatts to sort of power the pump pipeline.
But there’s also issues about whether you need a constant sea of supply to the storage site. And there’s a lot of issues about developing that particular storage site actually off Net Zero Teesside, where they’re sort of saying it needs to have a constant supply at a certain rate. I think that’s when you start to hit problems, which have tried to overcome with the cluster model. But by trying to do that, they then really hit the greenhouse gas problem. So,
marc hudson 10:06
Sorry, when you said the greenhouse gas problem, you mean the volume?,
Andrew Boswell 10:10
Well, the greenhouse gas volume meaning that the emissions, which they can’t capture. Because all the methane emissions in the supply chain are uncatchable. And also the diesel from the shipping, if it’s LNG, and all the rest of it emissions from all that stuff is uncatchable. So it’s not carbon capture at all. There’s lots of emissions going out in the process which are not capturable at all.
marc hudson 10:36
I’m conscious of you wanting to have your meal and so forth. So two more questions. One is, if someone’s listening to this, if the transcript is suitably audible, or they’re reading it, and they think “I want to support Andrew Boswell’s work,” what do they do?
Andrew Boswell 10:54
Well, my work is sort of pro bono as such. I work basically pro bono, a sort of retired person with an interest. There have been times where when the case is coming up, we’ve needed to have financial support or something for the case, through crowd funders. So basically, it’s sort of “look out for things like that” at the moment. But to support my work more widely, in some non-financial way, I would say, just look out for what I’m doing. Because, you know, the campaign against CCS has really taken off.
At this moment, because I just finished a big legal case, I’m not quite sure what happens next. But we’re continuing the campaign to try to stop the government investing in all this.
And on the back of the [February 2025] Public Accounts Committee report, which is worth talking about because it’s highlighted several things. It highlighted that CCS is a very high-risk in trying to achieve net zero. The government it’s saying it’s harder to transition to net zero [without CCS]. The Public Accounts Committee have said that it’s very high risk in doing that. And they’re also saying it’s very high cost. We know the subsidies are now up to 60 billion pounds, the subsidies they’ve allocated to this
marc hudson 12:28
Sorry six billion or sixty billion?
Andrew Boswell 12:32
Sixty, Six zero, yeah, yeah. I can send you over a web page.
It’s all on one page, the DESNZ subsidies. And if you add up the ones which have got CCS in them, they’re already 60 billion, and you haven’t got blue hydrogen in there yet.
So it’s very costly. And the third point was they said, basically, the science isn’t fully determined yet, and there’s new science on the methane and so on. And the government need to take note of that. So we’re sort of coming in on the back of that, whether you know, in the budget or whatever the CCS could be cut in the budget.
marc hudson 13:14
In the seventh carbon budget?
Andrew Boswell 13:16
No, the national Treasury budget – so Rachel Reeve’s spending review in June, and her statement on March 26th leading up to it. There’s talk that she may cut CCS. The talk is that she may put it into the defence budget. I personally think it should be redirected to insulation and genuine green energy, because climate change is our biggest security risk.
And that’s not to underrate what’s happening. We’re going through a sort of process of the whole world order is changing. America is switching sides, and all the rest of it. And I understand we, you know, we have to consider our defence very seriously as well. But I don’t think we should just simply take green budgets and cut them. But where they’re bad, green budgets going for CCS – which isn’t going to help all the reasons in the Public Accounts Committee – we should redirect them to the stuff which will help insulation and genuinely green energy… So renewables and storage solutions…
marc hudson 14:25
Large scale batteries, etc, etc. Final question, anything else you’d like to say? Anything you thought, “Oh, he’s going to ask me this, and here’s my answer,”
Andrew Boswell 14:33
No, I think that’s that’s probably really good. Thank you.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 338ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the German climatological scientific elite, people like Herman Flohn and others, including IASSAere well into the energy climate society question in the late second half of the 1970s. Tis workshop is part of all that work.
What I think we can learn from this is that by the late 70s, people whose job it was to think about energy systems and their impact on “the environment” were pretty sure there were interesting times ahead. Now, of course, cynics will say “well, they’re paid to speculate on possible problems so they can get funding for workshops in “nice places”, and advance their careers.” And this is, of course, perfectly circular and is undisprovable. It also ignores the fact that physics exists, that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and that was established in the 1860s, 120 years before this workshop.
What happened next All through the 1980s up until ‘85 you see these sorts of workshops – scientists meeting, scratching their heads, exchanging ideas, becoming more and more sure. Tthen Villach really is the starting gun, and you can say that it wasn’t science, it was the political opportunity structure, because ozone was giving them kudos. And power, social power. Or you can say it was pure play “the science”, (see Wendy Franz).
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.
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.
Fifty three years ago, on this day, January 26th, 1972, a new technology came along.
CO2-enhanced oil recovery (EOR) has been carried out in the United States and Canada since the 1960s. The world’s first large-scale CO2-EOR project, Scurry Area Canyon Reef Operating Committee (SACROC), has been implemented by Chevron in the oilfield in Scurry County, Texas since January 26, 1972 [13]. The CO2 for this project comes from the natural CO2 fields in Colorado and is pipelined to the oilfield for flooding. More than 175 million tonnes of natural CO2 in total were injected in the SACROC project during 1972–2009 [14].
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 327ppm. As of 2025 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that economies were still growing at a rate that we would now consider either astonishing or Chinese. Energy companies were looking to extract more oil and gas, of course, and to do it as cheaply as possible. In retrospect, we can now see this is the formal beginning of enhanced oil recovery. But at the time, I guess it was just one more experiment (EOR had already been piloted on a much smaller scale).
What I think we can learn from this is that EOR, which is still the raison d’etre behind CCS, or the only way that it will make money, has a long history, longer than 1972.
What happened next
Well, CCS had a long, slow development process. There were studies in the late 70s through the 80s. There was momentary interest in it in 1989 and then the people who would have done it realized how much it would cost and how they could get more bang for their buck elsewhere. And CCS finally took off in the 2000s because the Kyoto Protocol looked like it might come into force, and rich nations needed something with which to pretend to be taking action.
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.
Thirteen years ago, on this day, December 7th, 2011, one of those technology advocacy network coalitions got going….
Environmental Organizations Announce CCS Network: Groups Support Carbon Capture and Sequestration as a Critical Climate Change Technology
(USA) December 7, 2011 – Today nine of the world’s leading environmental advocacy organizations launch the ENGO Network on CCS (Environmental NGO Network on Carbon Capture and Sequestration), formed to jointly pursue domestic and international policies and regulations enabling CCS to deliver on its emissions reduction potential safely and effectively. http://www.precaution.org/lib/catf_press_release_engo_ccs_network.111207.pdf [DEAD LINK]
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 392ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that CCS was in trouble – FutureGen was not working, the Australian efforts were coming to naught, the UK first competition was flailing, the European Union stuff not going well. What to do? Click your heels more vigorously and double-down on your public protestations of faith…
What I think we can learn from this: To really understand why stuff gets launched, you have to know what was happening at the time.
What happened next. People are still proclaiming their faith in CCS.
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.
Forty years ago, on this day, December 1st, 1984, Carbon Capture and Storage got an early study,
Systems study for the removal, recovery and disposal of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel power plants in the US
Abstract
This report examines the feasibility of preventing man-made CO/sub 2/ from entering the atmosphere. Utilities produce about 30% of the emissions of CO/sub 2/, therefore, the system is first applied in this study to the power plant effluents. An absorption/stripping stack gas scrubbing and regeneration process was chosen for the present system study. An improved solvent process is used and the process is integrated with the power plant operations to improve the efficiency of the combined plant. Three methods of disposal are selected and appropriately applied, depending on geographical proximity to the source power plants. The US Department of Energy Federal Region Divisions for utility power plants was utilised to aggregate and design the disposal system. The energy requirement to drive the various parts of the system is estimated. This is a first order design and cost estimation system study, made primarily for the purpose of determining the order of magnitude feasibility and economic costs for the removal, recovery, and disposal of CO/sub 2/ from power plant stacks in the US. The base year chosen for the systems analysis was 1980 and all capacity and costs are indexed to that year.
Authors: Steinberg, M; Cheng, H C; Horn, F
Publication Date: 1984-12-01
Research Org.: Brookhaven National Lab., Upton, NY (USA)
OSTI Identifier: 6084354 published 2 years later as https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ep.670050409?saml_referrer
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 345ppm. As of 2024 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that CCS had got its first serious push in 1977, with the publication of an article by Cesar Marchetti, an Italian physicist who had been asked to think about the issue by our good friends a the International Institute for Advanced Systems Analysis,t IIASA, never-knowingly out-technofixed. Albanese had done some work in the late 1970s, and this was a follow-up
What I think we can learn from this is that CCS has been talked about for almost 50 years. Still not delivering any detectable-compared-to-annual-emissions ‘savings’ (EOR doesn’t count, for obvious reasons).
What happened next. There was a spasm of interest in the late 1980s, but for real hype, you have to wait until the early 2000s.
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.
Forty five years ago, on this day, November 26th, 1979, a paper was submitted to the academic journal Energy….
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 337ppm. As of 2024 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Cesare Marchetti had proposed carbon capture and storage in 1975 – his article had been published in 1977. And here were some Americans at the Department of Energy talking about what that would entail.
What we learn is that CCS has a very long history, longer than its proponents might want you to believe.
What happened next Albanese kept studying it, studying what other people did. CCS really sort of became something that people were vaguely interested in, in about 1988/89 After the explosion of the greenhouse issue. And then CCS lived in the undergrowth, for about 10 years. And then really sort of 2002/3 is the pivot where it starts to get more attention. Still hasn’t been any meaningful amount of CO2 taken out of circulation, especially if you discount the fact that a lot of what has been captured was for enhanced oil recovery.
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.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 388ppm. As of 2024 it is 4xxppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that there was about to be a vote on Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. And alongside that, there was also peak hype for Carbon Capture and Storage, which was being attacked by clued-up elements of the environment movement as an expensive distraction and boondoggle that wasn’t going to fix climate change. It was being attacked by the denialists as an expensive boondoggle that was not going to fix a non-existent problem. What’s a little bit interesting here is that a relatively senior Liberal, was willing to come out and say the same. Perhaps dog whistling to the denialists perhaps simply because it was the truth, that CCS is a pipe dream.
What we learn is that there’s lots of people criticising CCS, and CCS’s answer would have been to deliver the goods. But the technology is incredibly expensive. There’s not really a market for it. And it hasn’t worked.
What happened next? Well, the CPRS fell over and then so did CCS. The Liberals got back into power in 2013 and abolished the carbon price. And the rest is history…
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.
