Gas companies have their eyes on the Northern Territory where they hope to frack their way to – in the words of the federal government – a “world-class gas province”.
This week, one executive claimed the territory’s Beetaloo Basin held “Australia’s greatest emissions reduction opportunity” – a claim swiftly ridiculed by climate groups.
For those unfamiliar with how these things work, fracking deep shale formations and then burning the gas adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
One analysis suggests if the Beetaloo was fully exploited, spurning LNG exports, this would add about 1.3bn tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere over two decades.
That’s almost triple Australia’s annual emissions. How’s that for an opportunity?
The CSIRO has been working with the NT government and the industry to get a baseline of the amount of greenhouse gas methane already occurring in the region.
But CSIRO has also produced fact sheets about the shale gas industry that question the role of methane in driving global warming and underplay its importance.
The fact sheets were released in May and appear on the NT government’s webpage for onshore gas as well as CSIRO’s page on the same subject.
They were produced by CSIRO’s Gas Industry Social and Environmental Research Alliance – a project that gets a third of its funding from the gas industry.
On two versions of a fact sheet titled “About natural gas from shale”, readers are told about the use of water and chemicals at wells.
“Also, methane is a greenhouse gas and may play a role in climate change,” the fact sheet states.
Saying methane may play a role in climate change is a bit like saying alcohol may play a role in getting people drunk.
“The statement in the fact sheet is wrong,” says Prof David Karoly, a leading climate scientist who retired from CSIRO earlier this year. “There is no doubt that methane has been a major contributor to global warming since the pre-industrial period.”
According to the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, methane emissions have caused 0.5C of global heating since the Industrial Revolution, only slightly behind the 0.8C temperature rise caused by carbon dioxide.
Karoly says: “Methane is second only to carbon dioxide as the most important anthropogenic contributors to global warming. Increases in fossil methane emissions arising from fracking will increase global warming and should be banned in Australia, in my opinion.”
A CSIRO spokesperson said the fact sheets were requested by the NT government and aimed “to provide clear, factual and relevant scientific content to those communities potentially impacted by gas exploration and development activities” for the territory.
The statement said: “There is an inaccuracy in the printed version of the fact sheet. It should say ‘Also, methane is a greenhouse gas and plays a role in climate change’. This will be corrected.”
Fact sheets reworked into audio files for Aboriginal communities had not made the same error, the statement said.
Not ‘however’
On another fact sheet about “Methane gas in the Northern Territory”, an FAQ section says methane “can cause a warming of the air and atmosphere.” For can, read: does.
The fact sheet adds: “Methane gas is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, however, it is in smaller amounts in the atmosphere (about 400 times less abundant).”
Methane causes 86 times as much warming as CO2 per molecule over a 20-year timeframe (or 28 times if you calculate its warming potential over 100 years).
However, telling people methane is 400 times less abundant, without telling them what that means, risks either adding to their confusion or leading them to think its potency is “however” cancelled out by its scarcity.
Not mentioned in the fact sheet is that most of the global heating from drilling for gas comes when it is sold and burned. That’s most of that 1.3bn tonnes.
Dud on batteries
Earlier this week, the federal opposition leader, Peter Dutton, asked “how the lights stay on over night-time” in a future electricity grid where coal plants close and the gas supply gets disrupted.
“What is going to firm up renewables? The battery in South Australia lasts for 75 minutes,” he said.
Dutton is referring to the Hornsdale Power Reserve – a big battery using Tesla technology, owned and operated by French company Neoen.
But Dutton’s claim is misleading because the battery was never designed to discharge all at once (the 75 minutes was also based on the battery’s 100MW capacity before a 50MW expansion last year).
Neoen commissioned Aurecon to write technical reports on the battery’s performance. The battery was used to respond quickly to changes in the grid and to maintain stability, the reports said.
Dr Roger Dargaville, an expert on energy systems at Monash University, says the HPR was there “to provide short sharp responses” to electricity demand and was not designed as a bulk backup.
Solar and wind can provide power during night-time hours or times of low wind if they’re linked to storage, such as batteries or pumped hydro plants.
Solar and wind energy that’s built with storage is already cheaper than building new coal and gas plants, Dargaville says. “At current coal and gas prices, it’s even cheaper than running an existing fossil fuel plant.”
Dargaville argues that, had the HPR been in place before storms sparked a 2016 statewide blackout, “it might have been able to keep the grid alive”.
