The Senate spent the past week debating legislation that would allow the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, to issue permits for carbon dioxide to be pumped into international waters.
The government bill passed with support from Coalition senators on Monday night after a fiery debate. The Greens senators and the independent senator David Pocock accused the government of doing the bidding of fossil fuel companies to allow new and expanded polluting projects. They said the government basically acknowledged this in the debate.
What are the sea-dumping laws?
The bill amends Australia’s sea-dumping laws – known as the Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Act 1981 – to bring them into line with two amendments made in 2009 and 2013 to the London Protocol, a global treaty on marine pollution.
Australia is a signatory to that treaty and the amendments would allow governments to regulate two activities: the export of CO2 from one country to another for sequestration under the seabed and the placement of waste or other matter into the ocean for “marine geoengineering” for scientific research, such as adding nutrients to the ocean to try to increase CO2 absorption from the atmosphere.
Other countries that have ratified the amendments, such as Japan and South Korea, could also export CO2 to Australia for the purpose of carbon capture and storage (CCS).
What does the government say?
Ratification of these amendments would allow the government to issue permits for these types of projects after what it has promised would be a rigorous assessment process.
Plibersek has argued it was already legal to import CO2 to be buried in CCS projects and without amendments to Australia’s laws there was a risk it could occur in an unregulated fashion. She said the legislation would increase protection of oceans and “ensure best practice is adopted”.
The export of CO2 is not legal unless a country has ratified the 2009 London protocol amendment.
The Labor senator Karen Grogan said during the debate that reaching net zero by 2050 was the government’s “unequivocal priority” and CCS could help reduce emissions from existing developments, cut pollution from “hard to abate industries” and support “low carbon hydrogen production” using gas.
The Coalition told the Senate it would support the bill as a “sensible and correct path” that had been adopted after a “painstaking” approach by successive governments to the proposed changes, including consideration through parliamentary inquiries.
What do the Greens and crossbench say?
The Greens, teal independents and Pocock accused the government of introducing the legislation to allow new and expanded fossil fuel projects.
More specifically, they said passage of the bill is meant to help fossil fuel projects that have included offshore CCS – storing CO2 under the seabed in international waters – as a key part of their design. The most prominent of those is Santos’ troubled Barossa gas project, which includes a proposed CCS facility in the depleted Bayu-Undan gas reservoir in waters off Timor-Leste.
The Greens accused the government of bowing to pressure from the gas industry and export partners Japan and South Korea, and noted CCS had not been proven to work at scale.
“We should feel ashamed as a chamber, in this time of climate emergency, that we are about to pass legislation written for a fossil fuel company, written by a government who takes big donations from fossil fuel companies,” Peter Whish-Wilson told the Senate last Monday.
During debate on Friday, the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, accused the Coalition of dragging out debate on a bill it had said it supported. In a heated moment, Wong said the LNP was blocking the wishes of gas companies. She said they had “said no to Santos, you’ve then said no to Woodside, you’ve said no to Inpex … you’ve said no to Korea, you’ve said no to Japan”.
The West Australian reported that the resources minister, Madeleine King, had written on Friday to her Coalition counterpart, Susan McDonald, to say failure to pass the bill expeditiously could undermine investment confidence and jeopardise “the ability of the resources sector to decarbonise its supply chains”.
Teal independents in the lower house and Pocock proposed amendments to the bill that would have prevented permits being issued for offshore CCS for fossil fuel projects. Permits would have been limited to industries in which it is hard to cut emissions and there are not yet clean alternatives, such as cement. These amendments were voted down.
What does it mean for our oceans?
The Australian Marine Conservation Society raised serious concerns that the bill, and similar legislation in other countries, would ultimately enable the “industrialisation of our oceans”.
The organisation’s offshore oil and gas campaigner, Louise Morris, said it would allow the global trade of CO2 “at a scale never seen before that would require infrastructure, pipelines, shipping routes for an entire new industry”.
“CCS has been around for 40 years, it’s unsafe, unviable,” Morris said. “The leaking of carbon capture and storage projects internationally has shown it to be dangerous for marine life because leaking CO2 acidifies the ocean.
“Acidifying oceans dissolve shells of shellfish, for example crayfish, which radically alters the marine ecosystem.”
The organisation has called on the government to explain how it plans to regulate the trade of CO2.
