Extract from The Guardian
There has been a lot of hot air recently about the role of gas in Australia’s future energy generation. At last week’s COAG meeting,
the overwhelming takeaway message from our newly minted energy and
environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, was that gas was good, not to
mention vital for our future energy solution.
For Frydenberg, gas is the key plank of Australia’s solution to climate change: the low-carbon panacea that will help us meet our obligations under the Paris agreement. Indeed, he has so much faith in gas that he is applying pressure on Victoria to overturn its current moratorium on onshore drilling and give the industry a foothold in the Australian state with the highest population growth rate.
This action would open up some of our most productive farmlands to a ravenous and destructive industry, and lock Australia into decades of dependence on fossil fuel energy when renewable energy is cheaper and more effective than ever.
We have seen what gas has done in other parts of Australia and the US, where tap water becomes flammable, farmland is ruined and communities torn apart. As you can imagine, this is a move that is desperately unpopular with farmers, traditional owners and rural communities alike.
So where does this new fervour for gas stem from? Especially from Frydenberg, who once loved coal so much, he called it good for humanity.
As coal is seen as being increasingly toxic to the health of the planet – and communities – the gas industry sees a chance to capitalise in the new post-coal market. The role of coal in our future energy generation is facing challenges from other factors as well since the world agreed to step up on climate change in Paris in December.
The share of renewable energy is growing in Australia and worldwide. Nationally, we have a plan for about 23% of all energy to be generated by renewables by 2020. This is the baseline, while states such as Victoria, Queensland and South Australia have more ambitious goals on top of the national renewable energy target. The ACT is leading nationally with a plan for 100% renewable energy by 2020 and looks on track to achieve it.
The increase of power coming from renewable sources means the manner in which energy and the grid interact has changed fundamentally – and will continue to do so. And this is helping to contribute to the end of coal power generation. If the wind suddenly stops blowing, or the sun stops shining and back-up power is needed, coal power plants take too long to fire up and fill the void: coal and renewables are not compatible.
This is where gas feels it has an edge. Not only does it promote itself as a cleaner alternative, but it also has a much quicker response rate if power is suddenly needed. However, a recent report has suggested there may be difficulties in relying on gas. .
A recent report from the Melbourne Energy Institute suggested that the Torrens Island power plant potentially gamed the South Australian market by deliberately withholding power until the last moment it was needed, and then charging massive amounts for it. If true, it was estimated power companies made upwards of $40m from this highly dubious practice, at the expense of South Australia power consumers.
But by far the biggest argument against gas – along with the astounding damage it does to farmland and local communities in the process of extraction – is that more and more research is coming out to challenge the claim that gas is a cleaner option.
Modelling conducted by the International Energy Agency (IEA), shows that if the planet converted heavily to “clean” gas today, global temperatures would still rise by 3.5 degrees. We are already seeing the impacts of climate change today.
If we raise the planet’s temperature by 1.5 degrees, we can say goodbye to many of our Pacific neighbours, who would become a modern day Atlantis story. Raise it by 3.5 degrees and it doesn’t bear listing here how horrific things will become. Suffice to say, the storms, droughts and extreme heatwaves we face today will pale in comparison.
The social and political fallout from a world that is 2.5 degrees hotter than today’s should be worrying to all of us. And yet that is the best case scenario if we give the gas industry a front-row seat in our energy mix.
And I say “best case” because the IEA’s modelling doesn’t factor in the gas industry’s fugitive emissions. This is the methane pollution that leaks out of wells and pipelines at every stage of the production line. These leaked emissions are 105 times worse than CO2, which is why experts agree they cancel out any climate benefit gas may have been thought to offer.
There is no accurate measurement of these emissions, so there is no way to know how much the industry is setting loose into the atmosphere – particularly in Australia where almost no independent studies have been carried out.
Add that to the astounding startup and infrastructure costs of expanding the gas industry – the new plants and pipelines, not to mention cleaning it up to hopefully stop the fugitive emissions – and it quickly becomes apparent that the gas “solution” is a furphy our elected leaders are trying to hide behind to pretend business as usual is good enough on climate change. That somehow we can just switch from coal to gas, whack up a few wind turbines, and that is the problem solved.
It just doesn’t add up. Even the industry knows this – including Australia’s largest power company and carbon emitter, AGL. The company is divesting many of its gas assets and has been calling on governments to work with the industry to come up with a coherent strategy to transition from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy.
Sadly Australia has lagged well behind other countries on the march to renewable energy – China has just passed 200GWs of solar and wind capacity and investment in countries such as the US, Germany, Denmark, Brazil, Canada and India has taken the share of the world’s energy coming from renewable sources to 20% in 2015.
The choice, quite genuinely, couldn’t be clearer. Australia must join the rest of the world and start investing in the renewable energy systems we know will be required, and building them now. We simply can’t afford to flirt with new gas infrastructure that the science says won’t be able to run for even a third of its normal life.
It’s time our politicians stop their gas-is-good propaganda and instead roll up their sleeves, engage with the industry and start the difficult but necessary work of making our power systems transition to 100% renewable energy.
For Frydenberg, gas is the key plank of Australia’s solution to climate change: the low-carbon panacea that will help us meet our obligations under the Paris agreement. Indeed, he has so much faith in gas that he is applying pressure on Victoria to overturn its current moratorium on onshore drilling and give the industry a foothold in the Australian state with the highest population growth rate.
This action would open up some of our most productive farmlands to a ravenous and destructive industry, and lock Australia into decades of dependence on fossil fuel energy when renewable energy is cheaper and more effective than ever.
We have seen what gas has done in other parts of Australia and the US, where tap water becomes flammable, farmland is ruined and communities torn apart. As you can imagine, this is a move that is desperately unpopular with farmers, traditional owners and rural communities alike.
So where does this new fervour for gas stem from? Especially from Frydenberg, who once loved coal so much, he called it good for humanity.
As coal is seen as being increasingly toxic to the health of the planet – and communities – the gas industry sees a chance to capitalise in the new post-coal market. The role of coal in our future energy generation is facing challenges from other factors as well since the world agreed to step up on climate change in Paris in December.
The share of renewable energy is growing in Australia and worldwide. Nationally, we have a plan for about 23% of all energy to be generated by renewables by 2020. This is the baseline, while states such as Victoria, Queensland and South Australia have more ambitious goals on top of the national renewable energy target. The ACT is leading nationally with a plan for 100% renewable energy by 2020 and looks on track to achieve it.
The increase of power coming from renewable sources means the manner in which energy and the grid interact has changed fundamentally – and will continue to do so. And this is helping to contribute to the end of coal power generation. If the wind suddenly stops blowing, or the sun stops shining and back-up power is needed, coal power plants take too long to fire up and fill the void: coal and renewables are not compatible.
This is where gas feels it has an edge. Not only does it promote itself as a cleaner alternative, but it also has a much quicker response rate if power is suddenly needed. However, a recent report has suggested there may be difficulties in relying on gas. .
A recent report from the Melbourne Energy Institute suggested that the Torrens Island power plant potentially gamed the South Australian market by deliberately withholding power until the last moment it was needed, and then charging massive amounts for it. If true, it was estimated power companies made upwards of $40m from this highly dubious practice, at the expense of South Australia power consumers.
But by far the biggest argument against gas – along with the astounding damage it does to farmland and local communities in the process of extraction – is that more and more research is coming out to challenge the claim that gas is a cleaner option.
Modelling conducted by the International Energy Agency (IEA), shows that if the planet converted heavily to “clean” gas today, global temperatures would still rise by 3.5 degrees. We are already seeing the impacts of climate change today.
If we raise the planet’s temperature by 1.5 degrees, we can say goodbye to many of our Pacific neighbours, who would become a modern day Atlantis story. Raise it by 3.5 degrees and it doesn’t bear listing here how horrific things will become. Suffice to say, the storms, droughts and extreme heatwaves we face today will pale in comparison.
The social and political fallout from a world that is 2.5 degrees hotter than today’s should be worrying to all of us. And yet that is the best case scenario if we give the gas industry a front-row seat in our energy mix.
And I say “best case” because the IEA’s modelling doesn’t factor in the gas industry’s fugitive emissions. This is the methane pollution that leaks out of wells and pipelines at every stage of the production line. These leaked emissions are 105 times worse than CO2, which is why experts agree they cancel out any climate benefit gas may have been thought to offer.
There is no accurate measurement of these emissions, so there is no way to know how much the industry is setting loose into the atmosphere – particularly in Australia where almost no independent studies have been carried out.
Add that to the astounding startup and infrastructure costs of expanding the gas industry – the new plants and pipelines, not to mention cleaning it up to hopefully stop the fugitive emissions – and it quickly becomes apparent that the gas “solution” is a furphy our elected leaders are trying to hide behind to pretend business as usual is good enough on climate change. That somehow we can just switch from coal to gas, whack up a few wind turbines, and that is the problem solved.
It just doesn’t add up. Even the industry knows this – including Australia’s largest power company and carbon emitter, AGL. The company is divesting many of its gas assets and has been calling on governments to work with the industry to come up with a coherent strategy to transition from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy.
Sadly Australia has lagged well behind other countries on the march to renewable energy – China has just passed 200GWs of solar and wind capacity and investment in countries such as the US, Germany, Denmark, Brazil, Canada and India has taken the share of the world’s energy coming from renewable sources to 20% in 2015.
The choice, quite genuinely, couldn’t be clearer. Australia must join the rest of the world and start investing in the renewable energy systems we know will be required, and building them now. We simply can’t afford to flirt with new gas infrastructure that the science says won’t be able to run for even a third of its normal life.
It’s time our politicians stop their gas-is-good propaganda and instead roll up their sleeves, engage with the industry and start the difficult but necessary work of making our power systems transition to 100% renewable energy.
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