What will Australia do About Climate change?

We do need to have energy security or there will be big economic consequences.

We also need to have emission reductions

At present there is so much uncertainty about the direction the government will take that there is no incentive for existing coal fired power plants to put money into preventive maintenance and this could well impact on our energy security.

Our government appears to be pinning its hopes on carbon capture and storage so that we can maintain the status quo with coal fired power.  Over seas the Danish company, Dong Energy is dropping the development of Carbon Capture Storage (CCS) technology as it is too expensive.

However in Australia CCS research is said to be fairly advanced – with Santos in SA being a commercial leader who has been storing natural gas underground for over 40 years.

I read earlier today that there is quite a lot of additional activity around CCS in Australia with the majority of the funding available from the Federal government and some State Governments also pursuing various initiatives.

I could quote Einstein again “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”.  The government does seem to be clinging to thinking about coal fired power!  I am unclear how this will solve the problems that excessive coal use has caused.

envirojean

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This entry was posted on Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 at 7:01 am and is filed under Global Warming, Climate Change & Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.