In the bizarro world of Kevin Gallagher, CEO of Australia’s worst climate culprit Santos, the path to a net-zero carbon world lies through increasing fossil fuel use — specifically oil and gas, which his company produces — by pouring money into opening new extraction sites for fossil fuels. And it means “decarbonisation, not defossilisation”.
Note that phrase from Gallagher. He sees a bright future for fossil fuels in a net-zero world. He wants “the decarbonisation projects that will enable an orderly transition, rather than the chaos we are seeing today”.
That’s corporate double-speak for carbon capture and storage (CCS), which Santos and other climate culprits like Woodside are relying on to enable them to continue to make billions from gas exports (while paying minimal tax).
Santos is a big spruiker of CCS, inevitably subsidised by the previous government, which devoted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to it. Gallagher claims CCS is “proven technology for low-cost, large-scale emissions reduction”.
Labor, which like the Coalition has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from Santos in recent years, is also supporting CCS, as is the Biden administration in the US, which is offering billions in CCS subsidies to fossil fuel companies.
The extent to which CCS has been discredited has been repeatedly pointed out by Crikey over the years — including the immortal, honest observation of a major US coal executive: “It is neither practical nor economic. It is just cover for the politicians, both Republicans and Democrats that say, ‘Look what I did for coal,’ knowing all the time that it doesn’t help coal at all.”
Insert oil and gas in that sentence instead and you get an accurate description of what Santos is doing.
It would be worthwhile to check in on the current status of CCS in Australia. The spectacular failure of the flagship CCS project in Australia, Chevron’s Gorgon CCS project in Western Australia, is a matter of public record. Last month, the WA Environmental Protection Authority responded to an application by Chevron to soften the conditions of its permits to operate its Barrow Island facility by proposing to tighten them and make them clearer, especially in relation to Chevron’s commitment to capture and store 80% of CO2 produced from the Gorgon gas field. It also rejected Chevron’s attempts to change the carbon accounting rules and demanded that the company proceed consistently to full abatement by 2050.
Chevron admitted in its most recent environmental report that it was far short of its 80% commitment. The EPA’s report noted that injection levels fell markedly in calendar 2021. And remember that Gorgon involves literally the simplest, lowest-cost, easiest form of CCS there is — taking CO2 that’s already been captured as part of the process of extracting gas from the gas field, and pumping it back underground.
The truth is the world desperately needs defossilisation, not the climate version of Potemkin villages purporting to represent decarbonisation but continuing to enable massive CO2 emissions. But taxpayers continue to fund CCS under Labor, just as it was funded under the Coalition.
