Esso pressured over carbon dioxide - Business - Business - theage.com.au

Esso pressured over carbon dioxide -

GREEN groups have called on the State Government to insist Esso Australia include a full review of the environmental costs of a proposed gas treatment plant in Gippsland that will emit as much as 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.
Esso Australia has submitted plans for its Longford gas conditioning plant to Planning Minister Justin Madden.
The venture, owned with BHP Billiton, would process natural gas from the new offshore Kipper field, which contains relatively high levels of carbon dioxide.
The plant will extract most of the carbon dioxide to make the natural gas usable.
The Australian Conservation Foundation says Esso should be required to submit a full environmental effects statement (EES) that includes consideration of injecting the greenhouse gas into underground basins rather than simply pumping it into the atmosphere as proposed.
An EES "would certainly give the public an opportunity to have discussion and debate of whether this plant should go ahead, and under what conditions", said Tony Mohr, ACF's chief climate change campaigner.
Rob Young, a spokesman for Esso Australia, declined to comment about whether the venture partners should examine so-called geo-sequestration of the carbon dioxide, a move that might add hundreds of millions of dollars in costs.
"We think we've set out all the information required, and we think that's adequate for the minister," Mr Young said. BHP Billiton referred questions to Esso, the proposed plant's operator.
Planning for the Longford plant may underscore differences in approaches to tackling global warming by Esso's parent, Exxon Mobil, and BHP Billiton, respectively the world's largest publicly traded oil and mining companies.
While Exxon Mobil has been among the leading corporate sceptics of the impact of greenhouse gases, BHP Billiton is preparing to update its climate change position that will include targets for improving energy efficiency and reducing the carbon intensity of its output. Under revised guidelines introduced last year, Mr Madden has the power to require projects emitting more than 200,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year provide an environmental effects statement.
A spokeswoman for Mr Madden said he would consider Esso's submission and decide on an environmental effects statement by April 12.
Mr Mohr said it was no surprise the submission excluded the prospect of carbon dioxide storage.
"There's no price on carbon in Victoria, there's no cap on greenhouse gas emissions from industrial sites like that, so why voluntarily go ahead with something that's going to cost money?" he said.
Peter Cook, chief executive of the Co-operative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies, said carbon dioxide storage had already been mastered in Norway and should be viable in Victoria well before the 2014 start date proposed for the Esso plant.
"We can say there's certainly an increasing amount of knowledge available on the storage capacity of the Gippsland Basin," Dr Cook said.