Technology cited by Greg Hunt as way to reduce carbon emissions is still ‘immature and unproven,’ science body says

CSIRO technology to clean up power stations cited by Greg Hunt as one of the two big things the world can do to immediately reduce greenhouse emissions is at least five years away and “still … relatively immature and unproven”, the CSIRO itself says.

Asked about the findings of the latest synthesis report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which called for immediate and rapid emission reductions and the phasing out of coal-fired power, the environment minister said: “Well, what we have to focus on is reducing emissions and the best thing we can do is to actually clean up existing power stations.

“What … we are proposing right now is to work with power stations, and we have the research of CSIRO which is talking about 30-50% reduction in emissions from brown coal power stations through their research on direct injection combustion engines,” Hunt told ABC radio.

The CSIRO recently provided information to Guardian Australia about the readiness of various technologies to reduce emissions for coal-fired power. It said: “Direct injection coal engines (Dice) has been subject to development for the past century. However, it is still a relatively immature and unproven technology … [it is] now close to the demonstration phase as an electricity generation application.”

The CSIRO said the technology was “more economically attractive” than coal gasification – another technology it is studying – and “not too far off the pace of costs of conventional plants”.

The technology involves changing brown coal into a type of coal that burns more cleanly in a new kind of diesel engine that can be fitted to coal-fired power plants.

Ignite Energy received $20m from the federal government in May to build a demonstration plant for the catalytic hydrothermal reactor, which produces synthetic crude oil as a by-product. The company’s chief executive, Len Humphreys, said the demonstration plant would be in operation by the end of 2016.

Power stations would then need to buy the new Dice engines, which are also still being developed.

Dr Louis Wibberley, principal technologist for energy technology at the CSIRO, told Guardian Australia the Dice technology could take five years to bring to market - two more years for testing and then time for refinement and production decisions.

But he said the technology was enormously promising. For a cost of about $20 a tonne of carbon dioxide abatement, it could reduce emissions from brown coal power stations by 50% and allow coal-fired power to “underpin” a much higher use of renewable energy.

In 2010, when the Direct Action policy was first released, Hunt said it could pay a higher price for big-emitting brown coal-fired power stations to tender to the emissions reduction fund (ERF) for their gradual replacement with cleaner gas. He said the tender could also include a subsidy to make sure this move did not push up consumer power prices.

This appears no longer to be part of the policy, and the government is banking on the Dice technology to reduce emissions from coal-fired power generators.

The government has not pre-empted the price it will pay those bidding in to its $2.5bn emissions reduction fund, but to achieve the minimum 5% emission reduction it will need to find greenhouse abatement at $10 a tonne or less – half the CSIRO’s estimated cost for Dice. But the ERF does allow for higher payments than the auction price under some circumstances.

John White, the chairman of Dicenet - an organisation bringing together companies involved with Dice technology - said the fact that the technology would not be commercially available for five years meant coal power stations were unlikely to be able to bid into the first $2.5bn phase of the coalition’s direct action policy, which covers the next five years, for money to help pay for its installation.

White said there was “no other technology that can halve the emissions from brown coal at such a low cost.”

But associate professor Frank Jotzo from the Australian National University said it didn’t make sense to try to halve emissions from brown coal.

“If we need a transition fuel we can use gas, and in the medium term half the emissions from brown coal is still too much. Without a policy-driven push to explcicitly promote the continued use of coal, the logical movement is to renewables,” he said.



And the executive director of The Climate Institute John Connor said it did not make sense for Australia to talk about halving emissions from brown coal - which would bring them into line with black coal - when the IPCC was talking about phasing out fossil fuel power unless it included full carbon capture and storage.

Hunt nominated preservation of “the great rainforests of the world” as the other “big thing’ countries could do to reduce emissions.

The IPCC report said said renewables needed to make up 80% of the world’s energy by 2050.

Hunt described Australia’s target of cutting emissions by 5% by 2020 as “one of the world’s leading reductions”. The independent Climate Change Authority found it should be trebled if Australia was to shoulder a fair share of global emissions reductions.