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Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release  7th of December 2012

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au
 

Stop the carbon capture madness

While Julia Gillard is blaming sky-high electricity prices on the poles and wires that are indispensable to power delivery, her government is burdening the electricity sector with pointless, unscientific and hugely expensive “green” requirements such as carbon capture and storage (CCS).

Carbon capture and storage or geosequestration is a multibillion dollar energy disaster in the making and would be better described as an oxygen burial program.

CCS aims to pump and compress carbon dioxide emitted from point sources such as power stations, to deep underground cavities in the earth’s crust. As any high school chemistry student knows, carbon dioxide is a chemical compound comprised of one part carbon and two parts oxygen. By mass, carbon dioxide is 72.7 per cent oxygen—all of which is to be pumped deep underground!

This oxygen burial exercise is nearly as insane as extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers as per Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels—and it’s incredibly expensive.

An April 2012 CSIRO report, Assessing Post-Combustion Capture for Coal-fired Power Stations in Asia-Pacific Partnership Countries, estimates that installing this technology on just half of Australia’s coal-fired power stations would cost $52 billion upfront and another $5 billion per year in operating costs. This is an increase in the cost of electricity generation of $60/MWh.

CCS is so expensive because for every tonne of fuel combusted, several tonnes of gases must be processed and compressed. For example, each tonne of coal burnt at a power station requires about 10 tonnes of air, largely because the atmosphere is comprised of mostly nitrogen gas. This means the CCS system must process several tonnes of flue gases and separate out about 2.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide gas (depending on the carbon content of the coal) for each tonne of coal that is burnt. Then enormous power is required to pump the carbon dioxide underground to a depth of typically two or three kilometres.

This enormous power required demands around 30 per cent of the power station’s output. This is called the “energy penalty” and means that there is a 30 per cent drop in electricity production for the same tonnage of combusted fuel. The above referenced CSIRO report states that “[t]he additional investment required to cover the energy penalty resulting from the introduction of PCC [post-combustion capture] appears to equal the investment related to PCC process.” This means that in addition to the enormous PCC cost, an equal amount of funding is required to build more power stations to make up for the massive energy penalty. And naturally, power stations will be burning much more fuel for the same power output!

The Australian Government has allocated funding of $1.68 billion dollars to a CCS Flagships program which supports the construction and demonstration of large-scale integrated CCS projects in Australia. CCS has bipartisan support from Labor and the Liberal/National Coalition. The Coalition’s $3.2 billion Direct Action Plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by five per cent by 2020 based on 1990 levels and their longtime championing of CCS demonstrates they are just as shamefully pushing this carbon madness.

The Howard government established the $500 million Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund in 2005 to support projects such as the Gorgon Carbon Dioxide Injection Project—the largest CCS project in the world. The plan is to inject up to 3.3 million tonnes per annum of carbon dioxide into a geological formation more than two kilometres beneath Barrow Island. The carbon dioxide injection project was granted approval by Liberal Premier Colin Barnett on 14 September 2009.

In May 2007, Nationals leader then Trade Minister Warren Truss stated: “I urged China [when he was in Beijing the previous month] to work closely with us on emerging technologies such as carbon capture and storage. These technologies will be key to reducing future emissions while still allowing use of abundant coal supplies in China.”

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd helped set up the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute in 2008 and while it has faced criticism for enormous spending on offshore consultants and plush hotel rooms, the real crime is that this so-called technology is a complete farce, will help to further destroy our economy and it seeks to deny nature the life-giving gas—carbon dioxide.

By contrast, the CEC calls to expose the climate fraudsters and increase our carbon footprint, as we clearly declared last year in our media release of 5 August 2011.

Join the CEC to help increase Australia’s carbon footprint through expanded production of the cement, aluminium and steel that the nation needs for crucial infrastructure.

To find out more on the fraud of global warming, click here.

Click here for a free literature pack on the fraud of global warming.

If you have already received a free offer, click here to purchase a copy of the “Free Energy” DVD ($10).

Click here to join the CEC as a member.

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