My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bungelung Calcuttin woman from Gadighal Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and torrest Rate island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily os It's Tuesday, the eighth of August.
I'm Zara Seidler, I'm Sam Kozlowski.
A controversial plan to store carbon at the bottom of the ocean is dividing Australian politicians. On the one hand, the government saying the process saves carbon from escaping into the atmosphere.
Returning human produced carbon dioxide back to where it effectively came from, if done safely, seems to be a fairly sensible thing to do.
While critics of the scheme say it's just an excuse for the government to approve more gas projects.
A right to register my distress and disgust at this bill.
And my disappointment in the government which seeks to pass it.
So when it comes to carbon capture what's working, what's gone wrong, and what's going to happen moving forward. TDA journalist Tom Crowley is going to come unpack it all in the Deep Dive at Fair Sam The headlines.
The Matilda's Dream is Still Alive. The Matilda's beat Denmark Tunil last night in front of over seventy five thousand fans at Sydney's Stadium, Australia. That means they're off to face either France or Morocco on Saturday night in Brisbane, and it could mean that they're destined for their first World Cup victory.
We're expecting to hear about some job losses at David Jones that are reportedly set to occur, and it comes as the retailer confirmed to TDA that it will quote streamline processes and eliminate tasks that are not focused on people or service. David Jones says it's actively working to redeploy team members where possible.
The man found guilty of killing a seventeen year old schoolgirl in the New South Wales town almost twenty five years ago will be jailed for a maximum of thirty two years. Craig Henry Rumsby will be eligible for parole after twenty four years. He was found guilty of the murder in June, in addition to the assault of another woman in nineteen ninety eight.
And the good news, Australia's first purpose built cystic fibrosis ward has been opened. Cystic fibrosis is an inherited disease that causes damaging mucus build up in the body's organs. The ward was opened at a Sydney hospital and is aimed at providing specialized care and treatment for adults with cystic fibrosis. Tom, Welcome back to the pod.
Lovely to be Here'sara, You're here.
For a very important reason. It's to talk about dumping carbon at the bottom of the ocean. You're going to need to make some sense of that for.
Me, yes, well, dumping carbon at the bottom of the ocean was a slightly confusing headline that I had to grapple with last week. Zara, and I mean, as you know, I think something that we have in common. Neither of us are great scientific minds, so it took me a little while to wade my way through this particular story when I covered it last week. Turns out to be a fascinating one. Though it's got a bit of science in it, it's got a bit of politics in it.
It tells us something really interesting, I think about the weeds of climate action.
You're promising a lot there with why it might be interesting, but I think that we need to take it back a step. Why would we dump carbon at the bottom of the ocean.
So dumping carbon at the bottom of the ocean is part of a broad category of things called carbon capture and storage, which, basically, as the name suggests, is the idea that you might capture carbon dioxide before it gets
to the atmosphere and then store it somewhere. So if you pictures are say like a factory or a coal plant or something that's normally going to be pumping carbon dioxide into the the idea is essentially, you know what if we had a way to capture that, stick it in the back of a truck or on a ship, and then find somewhere that you can store it. And one of the places it turns out that we can store carbon dioxide is by injecting it into rocks deep
under the ground. So, for scientific reasons that I hope you won't ask me to explain, there are particular types of rock that are suitable for this, porous rocks deep underground, and then you know there's another layer of rock above that the gas can't get up through, and essentially the gas can stay there permanently, I guess, out of harm's way. And there are, as it turns out, many of these sort of suitable rock formations at the bottom of the ocean.
So for example, old oil and gas fields, it seems tend to be quite suitable places to do this, And generally speaking, there are a lot of ocean formations where people believe this kind of thing might be possible. It's an emerging area of technology, but the idea is it could hold a bit of promise as an alternative way to reduce emissions.
So you're talking there about basically capturing emissions before they rise and then somehow transporting them to be in the bottom of the ocean, right, that's what you're saying. That's right, And so then I mean, it sounds pretty good on the face of it if that can happen, if they're not getting up into the air, that sounds like good news.
That's great, doesn't that sor?
Right?
Yeah, it does surely have to be a catch.
Yeah, it's fair to say there's been a couple of hitches so far Zara with carbon capture and storage, namely the capture and also the storage.
Two fundamental parts of carbon capture and storage spall issues.
So this is I mean, I'm making light of it. This is something that does happen successfully on occasion. But so far, what we've tended to find in you know, over the few years where we've been trying to do this, is that the capture part can be a bit leaky, so you know, generally doesn't capture you know, as much of the carbon dioxide as you might like. And then the storage can be a bit difficult as well to
achieve success fully. And again the concern that it's not air tight and that it leaks out, and particularly at the bottom of the ocean, if your storage is leaky, if your injection method doesn't work, then that can damage marine life around the bottom of the ocean and can have significant environmental impacts. So both parts of the problem
are still really works in progress. But there's a broader issue that comes back to the politics and to the broader climate change debate, and that is that where this carbon capture and storage, or CCS as I'll refer to it for shorthand, is actually just going to be used as a bit of an excuse for I guess, genuine emissions reduction, because we're talking about designing these complicated ways to take carbon dioxide out of the sky and put
it in the ground. Of course, in a sense, the simpler way would be to just not be emitting it in the first place. And especially when you look at energy and obviously we're talking about a transit towards renewable energy that doesn't have you know, any emissions or that is, you know, very low emissions. There's been a suggestion from a lot of environmentalists that CCS is I guess, getting in the way of genuine emissions reduction, especially when it's
being used in the context of fossil fuel burning. And I think generally speaking, environmentalists suggests that, you know, fossil fuel companies often want to use CCS as a way to prolong their burning of fossil fuels, and so as a result you know, global agreements on this.
Can you just explain that would why would that prolong their use of fossil fuels?
Yeah, So, I guess, effectively the idea being if a coal plant or a gas plant could say, well, hey, you know, we can keep burning coal because we can just capture all the emissions and stick them in the ground and there's no negative impact on the climate. That's essentially you know, the argument that they might make. And when this technology hasn't been working perfectly, that's the kind
of thing that environmentalists say they're worried about. And so when you look at global agreements around CCS, and you know, the big international agreements, the language that the UN and the IPCC and others tend to use is that CCS has a lot of potential for activities where emissions are really hard to reduce. So a classic example is cement production, where we just don't have a way of making cement
that is greener that doesn't emit. And so you know, that's something where CCS might be really useful, but international experts tend to be wary about using it in the context of fossil fuels. And that's where this starts to get into some thornier politics.
All right, So you just segued us there pretty nicely. We're talking about this because of the government and some legislation right we are.
So the government has a bill in Parliament to expand the capacity for companies to do ccs in Australia underwater. Now, the first thing to say is that it is already legal to do this in Australia.
With is it widespread.
It's reasonably widespread. It happens a little bit.
They're about thirty underwater projects worldwide, including some in Australia, which shall come to in a moment. You've got to get a permit granted by the Environment Minister and it has to happen according to certain safeguards. But at the moment it is legal to happen within Australian waters. What's not currently legal is for Australian companies to export carbon for the purposes of carbon capture and storage in other countries waters, and that's what the government's now trying to change.
And the specific reason, really the context for this is that there is a gas company in Australia that wants to do this in another country's waters, and that is Santos, the gas giant in the Northern Territory. They have an oil and gas field that is sort of based off the Northern Territory. That's about to come out of commission, and they say they could use that decommissioned oil and gas field to store about ten million tons of carbon
dioxide each year. It's a whole lot, but it overlaps with the waters of Team or Less Day and so it would require a different set of approvals. Team or Less Day is broadly supportive of the idea. This is a bill that the Government is pushing through. It's not explicitly about Santos, but it would allow that project and other projects like it to get off the ground subject to official approvals. And that's something the Government introduced to Parliament.
In the real world that we live in, including here in Australia, most people still drive petrol cars and rely on coal and gas for their energy. We cannot change that overnight, it is as simple as that. But we can begin to take mitigation measures such as carbon capture and storage to reduce atmospheric carbon wherever it is safe to do so.
It's so interesting, and I mean, I can imagine it's contentious for a number of reasons. What's the response to the Government's bill being.
So It has encountered some backlash from Greens and independence in the Parliament. I guess essentially making similar arguments to the ones that I'm referring to earlier, that you know, the sorts of concerns that environmentalists have here, and that is the idea. The word they use is green washing that essentially CCS is used as an excuse by fossil fuel companies to keep doing what they're doing.
Are we dumping carbon in the sea to protect the marine environment? Isn't carbon capture and storage an old and failed technology, And rather than fight climate change, won't this bill make it worse by enabling more gas minds to proceed.
And there is a bit of a track record of that actually in Australia, so we mentioned earlier, the biggest underwater CCS project in the world was started by Chevron off the coast of Wa in twenty nineteen, and it was a catastrophic failure. Continues to be a catastrophic failure. It just hasn't worked. They haven't been able to actually
store the gas at the bottom of the ocean. And I guess what the Greens and independents are concerned about is that Chevron used this CCS to justify essentially a new gas project because they were able to say to the government at the approval stage, well, hey, this new gas project's going to be super green because we're going to take all the emissions and we're going to stick
it at the bottom of the ocean. But that second part hasn't worked, and in general the technology for that second part is a little bit underdeveloped, and so they say, well, this is really just a bit of a you know, a fig leaf. Greenwashing is the word that they use for companies like Chevron to be able to do that. And they point to there's a precinct called the Middle Arm Precinct in the Northern Territory which has some government
funding behind it. It's framed as this sustainability precinct. It has some CCS facilities involved, but it also happens to be key to unlocking gas exploration in the Bee lou Basin, another controversial new gas project. And so, you know, the concern there is is that this is actually, you know, this is an idea that has the support of the fossil fuel industry, and the Greens oppose it for that reason. The Independents don't pose it quite as directly as that.
They say that they would support the bill with some amendments. In particular, they're asking, well, can you just than fossil fuel companies from using CCS and restrict it to cases like cement. Now, that would go well beyond the scope of the government's current bill. That would be a much bigger change to existing practices. But that's the kind of
thing that they're currently calling for. And you know, more broadly speaking, I think both the Greens and the Independents are suggesting that this CCS might sound like an emission's reduction method, but they see something different in it.
I'm curious to know where the opposition lands on this topic.
Well, the Opposition, they haven't formally expressed a view. So the way these things usually go is that bills go through committees of parliamentarians that consider them in detail, and all that happens off Broadway, and in that process the Coalition didn't raise any objections. Generally speaking, when they were
in government, they were very supportive of ccs. So although they haven't stated a formal position yet, it's expected that they're likely to support this, which would mean of course that the Greens and the independence their votes are essentially irrelevant, and that we see a bit of that in the government response. I mean, the government has defended its bill. The Government's tried to emphasize the fact that by putting safeguards around this, essentially, you know, by legalizing it with
a permit system, you get greater control over it. You will also get greater control over any other countries who want to try and do this in our waters. That this would actually Environment Minister Tenny plyversexes. It's about protecting our oceans, but you know also that this might help to reduce emissions. But yeah, I mean I think that this is one it's a I guess it's an issue you do need to kind of peel back some of
the layers to understand what's really going on here. And certainly when I saw this headline, I guess when you when you look at CCS as a broad principal thing, like you said at the start of the podcast, are you look at it and your guard It sounds sounds great, it's quite it's quite common, replicated, and it's quite contentious. And I think that this is one of those issues.
It may sail through the Parliament with the Coalition support, but it's one of these ones where, yeah, the devil is in the detail and you know, one form of
emission's reductions and another form of emissions reduction. The differences between these things can actually be be really complicated, and good to take the opportunity for a little bit of a deep dive into climate change, even if it did require both of us to talk about probably more science than we've done in the last three or four months combined.
And I specially appreciate that you just said the words deep dive when talking about the bottom of the ocean.
Carbon is better down where it's wetter under the seat.
Thanks for joining us on the Daily OS today. If you have a story you'd like us to explain this week, just leave it in the Spotify question box. We'll be back again tomorrow. Until then, have a great day.