PLEA Network

18 April 2018, Environmental Justice Australia. CCS: Throwing good money after bad pollution.Given the known failures of carbon capture and storage – and given that the federal government has lost millions of taxpayers’ dollars to CCS already – investing in such technologies could amount to improper use of public funds, writes EJA’s Bronya Lipski. In 2009 the Rudd government initiated a $1 billion carbon capture and storage program that was supposed to deliver two to four large-scale CCS projects. The program was significantly scaled back by the Abbott government in 2014. This downsizing was consistent with global trends, as it became increasingly apparent to governments that CCS was not an economically, nor an environmentally, appropriate pathway to serious emissions reductions. In 2017 the Australian National Audit Office reviewed the Federal Government’s CCS program and found none of the projects met the original timeframe or reached the stage of deployable technology, as originally envisaged in the program design. It seems bizarre, then, after the Abbott government stripped the CCS program of funds, and after the ANAO report found the project was overwhelmingly unsuccessful, that the Federal Government would now float the idea that the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) should be allowed to invest in CCS. That is what is proposed in the Clean Energy Finance Corporation Amendment (Carbon Capture and Storage) Bill. When the CEFC was first introduced in 2012, Mathias Cormann (then in Opposition) said the Rudd Government was ‘throwing money at ventures that are not commercially viable and that are competing with those projects that are trying to make a success of things’. In fact, the CEFC has been a great success – financially and for clean energy. Around this time last year, the CEFC said it had invested more than $3.3 billion in eligible clean energy projects, with a total project value of $8.3 billion, while also delivering a positive return for the taxpayer. Strong evidence suggests investing in CCS projects would not provide positive returns like investing in clean energy does. Read more here