The World Today - Coal, gas and renewables promote their green credentials

ELEANOR HALL: The Prime Minister's call for a debate on nuclear power has prompted other energy industries to try to wrest back the initiative in the electricity public relations war.John Howard says nuclear energy should be considered, in part because it may help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.But now coal, gas and the renewable power industries are hitting back, selling their green credentials.David Mark reports.DAVID MARK: In Australia, coal is king. It accounts for around 74 per cent of electricity production in this country, but the industry is taking the nuclear threat seriously.The coal industry is talking itself up as a potentially green industry, despite the fact that it currently accounts for 35 per cent of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions.The Executive Director of the Australian Coal Association, Mark O'Neill, points to the $300 million his industry has put towards the Coal 21 Fund, an industry and government program to reduce greenhouse emissions.MARK O'NEILL: The primary technology that is being investigated is capturing carbon dioxide when it leaves the power station after you've used either coal or natural gas, and pressurising it and putting it deep underground into geological formations that we know will hold it for millions of years.DAVID MARK: This is called sequestration?MARK O'NEILL: Called sequestration.DAVID MARK: Now, your critics say that this technology doesn't yet exist. It's not proven.MARK O'NEILL: Those critics would be… would be wrong. Injecting C02 into geological formations has been going on for years and years in the oil and gas industry. It's primarily being used to force oil and gas out of reservoirs, so you pump CO2 into those reservoirs to pressurise the reservoirs to help you extract oil and gas.DAVID MARK: Well, if the technology's existed for such a long time, as you say, why are you not doing it now?MARK O'NEILL: The key to doing it cost effectively is to focus on the technologies that are about to capture it at the power station in the first place.The key challenge for us is to get the cost of doing that at a very large scale down so that it's more cost competitive.DAVID MARK: And how far off is that? When might we see sequestration of CO2 in Australia?MARK O'NEILL: Full-scale, I would say we're looking at early… the early years of next decade.DAVID MARK: Is that just PR talk?MARK O'NEILL: Oh, no, absolutely not. We're hoping to have at least one project in Queensland injecting CO2 by the end of this decade. We would anticipate a similar situation in New South Wales and possibly two projects in Victoria.DAVID MARK: Gas comes second in energy production, accounting for 17 per cent of electricity generated in Australia.Its proponents, like the Western Australian Premier Alan Carpenter, have also come out fighting, saying it's plentiful.ALAN CARPENTER: It is a… an abundant supply of energy for Australia's future.DAVID MARK: And cleaner.RICK BRAZZALE: Emissions from gas are a fraction of what the coal industry emissions, perhaps around a third, and perhaps even less if we use it in cogeneration mode.DAVID MARK: That's Rick Brazzale, the Executive Director of the Australian Business Council for Sustainable Energy.Rick Brazzale's organisation represents the gas industry as well as the renewable energy sector, which includes hydro, wind, solar and biomass electricity producersRenewables produce no greenhouse gas emissions and account for around nine per cent of Australia's electricity generation. The vast bulk of that comes from hydro power.The problem is that these technologies are more expensive. And so electricity producers, who are looking for the cheapest product available, are sticking with coal. And there's little incentive for them to change.RICK BRAZZALE: In Australia at the moment we have a renewable energy target that's been successful in supporting the growth of renewable energy.DAVID MARK: That figure is around two per cent.RICK BRAZZALE: That's correct.But that program is essentially complete, and so there's very little scope for any new renewable power projects. So we've seen that industry pretty well stall at the moment.DAVID MARK: Across Australia, how many projects are currently being shelved that could be up and running? And if they were, what percentage of the electricity market would they account for?RICK BRAZZALE: There's more than 5,000 megawatts of renewable energy projects that have been shelved, and they could provide around five per cent of Australia's power needs. So this is technology that's available now, that could be rolled out, but there's just not a market for it at the moment.DAVID MARK: Rick Brazzale says if the Federal Government is serious about reducing greenhouse emissions, it needs to force business to invest in renewables.RICK BRAZZALE: Government's important role is to provide an economic framework that's going to drive private sector investment. And to do that you need to put in place some sort of pricing signal or recognise the pollution that conventional coal-fired power stations produce, and recognise that there's a cost for that.So you can do that through market-based mechanisms, like the renewable target, or things like emissions trading. But business is not going to invest in lower greenhouse emission technology unless there's a financial incentive to do that.ELEANOR HALL: And that's Rick Brazzale, the Executive Director of the Australian Business Council for Sustainable Energy, ending David Mark's report