Thw Age has reported that the Victorian Government is considering closing two of the Hazelwood power station’s eight power units. The La Trobe Valley power plant produces almost a quarter of Victoria’s electricity from brown coal and is regarded as Australia’s dirtiest power plant – some environmental groups claim that it is the dirtiest power plant in the developed world.

Closing a quarter of the plant would cut of 4 million tonnes of carbon emissions a year – just over 3% of Victoria’s annual emissions and 0.7% of annual national emissions.

A complete closure of Hazelwood would only go ahead once an emissions trading scheme – or an alternative federal opposition climate plan – is in place.

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A report by the US National Academy of Sciences shows that US coal-fired power plants do over $US62 billion ($au67 billion) in "hidden costs" through environmental damage every year.

These include damage done to crop and timber yields, to buildings and materials, to human health and damage done to recreational activities and through reduced outdoor visibility. They do not include any costs from climate change as a result of burning coal.

The study concluded that the aggregate damages associated with sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter emitted by American coal-fired power plants amounts to $US156 million ($au164 million) per annum on average per plant.

If the same results apply in Australia, the total "hidden cost" of Australia’s coal-fired power plants would be around $5 billion per annum – excluding any damage through global warming and ignoring the much larger effects of burning Australia’s exported coal.

The Queensland Government has approved the construction of a 900 megawatt "clean" coal-fired powerstation in the Galilee Basin.

The power station is to be built by Galilee Power which is owned by Waratah Coal Pty Limited. Waratah Coal announced Australia’s largest thermal coal mine and infrastructure project, worth $7.5 billion, earlier this year.

Waratah Coal said that the $1.25 billion power station, which will incorporate carbon capture and storage technologies, will employ 60 people when operating and about 1,000 during the construction phase. Construction is expected to start in about three years.

AGL Energy says that it will develop $6 to $7 billion in renewable energy projects in Australia over the next decade following the passage of the renewable energy target legislation.

AGL Energy’s chief executive, Michael Fraser, said that the passage of the legislation was very significant for his company and the industry. He said that in total about $25 billion to $30 billion of renewable projects would have to be built over the next decade to meet the target and that to achieve this, Australia would need about 4,500 wind turbines able to deliver around 9,000 megawatts of electricity.

Mr Fraser also said that, under the legislation, coal-fired power stations using brown coal would eventually have to shut down.

Queensland;s Premier Anna Bligh has released the government’s new climate change strategy, "ClimateQ: Towards a Greener Queensland".

The major initiative is that no new coal-fired power stations will be built in Queensland unless they use world’s best emissions technology and are able to capture and store carbon and must do so within five years of the technology becoming available. One new coal-fired power station is currently proposed for the state, to be built at Wandoan, near Miles. It is already part of a flagship carbon capture and storage scheme.

The climate change strategy also includes an anti-congestion plan, using a high-tech traffic management system, and programs to change travel habits and offset vehicle emissions. The carbon offset scheme will allow the public to purchase offsets for vehicle emissions with the funds being used to purchase biodiversity corridors across the state.

A CSIRO report on Queensland’s potential to mitigate greenhouse gas through biosequestration was also released.

The report found the Queensland government, as the third largest landholder in the world, has significant potential to create carbon "sinks", storing large amounts of carbon in forests and the soil.

Professor Tim Flannery, who is on the government’s climate change council, said it was timely, as US legislation had just created a $20 billion a year carbon sequestration industry there.

Australia’s 2009-10 Federal Budget has added $4.8 billion dollars to funds earmarked for projects related to climate change and carbon emission reduction – bringing its total commitment to $15 billion. Just a year ago, after the 2008-09 Budget, the total funding was just $2.3 billion, almost entirely allocated to "clean coal".

From the new funds, $2 billion will be spent over nine years developing between two and four industrial scale carbon capture and storage projects. These are expected to include a carbon dioxide storage hub and projects to demonstrate a range of technologies to capture carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations.

$1.5 billion will be spent over six years on building four large-scale solar power plants to generate up to one gigawatt of electricity – about as much as a coal-fired power station and almost three times as much as the largest solar power plant currently in operation. According to the Melbourne Age, one of these "solar flagship" projects will be a solar farm in the Mildura region originally announced by then-Prime Minister John Howard but without any commitment of Federal funds. The Victorian Government has already promised to contribute $100 million to the project if it goes ahead. (See http://www.aussierenewables.com.au/news/?p=31 for more on this proposal.)

The government will also establish a new organization, to be called Renewables Australia, which will receive $465 million over four years to support the development and commercialization of renewable-energy technology.

The Dutch research institute, CE Delft, has conducted an analysis of the "external" costs of using coal. The report was commissioned by Greenpeace.

The study evaluated those aspects of climate change, health impacts of air pollution and fatalities and injuries from major mining accidents for which reliable global data is available. CE Delft arrived at a conservative estimate of €360 billion ($AU700 billion) for the cost of these impacts. The report points out that costs from the impact of climate change are likely to rise substantially in the future.

The report also examines the impact of coal mining on several specific parts of the world, including India, Russia, Indonesia, China, Poland, Germany and Australia.

The report describes Australia as "King Coal’s dirty throne". The report points out that nearly a third of all exported coal traveling around the world comes from Australia. Newcastle is the world’s largest coal-exporting port shipping out over twice as much coal as the entire United States. Newcastle currently exports 80 million tonnes of coal annually. Plans are underway to expand capacity over the next five years to at least 120 million tonnes annually, and even as much as 200 million tonnes per annum.

The investigation found that in 2007 Australia was not only the largest exporter of coal, but the fourth largest producer and, despite its small population, the fourth largest consumer of coal.

By contrast, a Greenpeace report has shown that Australia could reduce reliance on coal and generate over 40% of its electricity from renewable energy by 2020. The Hunter Valley alone could provide 40% of New South Wales’s energy from renewable sources by 2020, creating more than 10,700 jobs in the process.

Click here to read the full report.

Carbon dioxide has been captured from power station flue gases in a post-combustion-capture (PCC) pilot plant at Loy Yang Power Station in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley. This is the first time CO2 has been caputured using the PPC process at a power plant in the Southern Hemisphere.

According to CSIRO Energy Technology Chief, Dr David Brockway, “PCC uses a liquid to capture CO₂ from power station flue gases and can potentially reduce CO₂ emissions from existing and future coal-fired power stations by more than 85 per cent.” Future trials will test a range of different CO₂-capture liquids.

The project is part of the Latrobe Valley Post Combustion Capture Project – a joint collaboration between Loy Yang Power, International Power Hazelwood, government and researchers from the CSIRO. The CSIRO is undertaking similar research at Munmorah in NSW and near Beijing in China and is negotiating the installation of another pilot plant at a Queensland site.

The Federal Government has quietly launched its draft bill  to regulate the burial of carbon dioxide off Australia coast just days after BP and Rio Tinto have confirmed that  they have abandoned a $2 billion project to trial the burial of carbon dioxide off Western Australia.

The joint project was to involve the construction of a coal-based "hydrogen energy" power plant at Kwinana, south of Perth, to produce 500MW of electricity – enough for 500,000 homes. The resultant carbon dioxide was to have been buried in geological strata between Fremantle and Rottnest Island. After two years of investigation, BP has discovered that this geological formation contains "chimneys" which means that it would be impossible to prevent the gas from escaping.

The $2 billion project would have been the biggest of its kind in the world.

Dr Peter Cook, the Chief Executive Officer of the Co-operative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas said “While it would have been nice to see the Kwinana project get off the ground, we do not see geosequestration in the Perth Basin as a write off because of this one setback and I don’t think the companies involved are walking away from the technology either, they’re certainly still involved with the CO2CRC in other areas. It has to be put in a global context and there are quite a few other projects that are moving ahead, including the Otway Basin project in Victoria. As well as the Perth Basin, in WA we’re also looking at a number of onshore areas, including an area known as the Harvey Ridge in the South West.”

At the Australia 2020 Summit in Canberra yesterday, the Population, Sustainability and Climate Stream proposed that, by 2020, Australia should "be making a major contribution to a comprehensive global response to climate change, including working with our partners on clean energy".

The Stream agreed that there should be a national sustainable cities program supported by taxes and other policies which encourage the use of public transport. By 2020, carbon neutrality should be required for all new buildings and all Australians should have access to smart meters measuring their energy and water consumption.

A proposal that no new coal-fired stations be built unless they have commercially proven carbon capture and sequestration received wide support and applause. However, the idea was opposed by a a group described by climate scientist David Karoly as industry figures within the stream and some others with concerns about the effects on coal mining communities. "There is and was within the group very strong support and a small minority of opposition that in the end prevented that because the minister and co-chairs wanted consensus," Professor Karoly said.

As a result of the minority opposition to the idea and despite calls for a vote, Stream Co-Chair, Senator Penny Wong, refused to take the proposal forward. "We’ve not voted on anything else, we’ve tried to come to agreement, a consensus agreement," she said.

Anna Rose, co-director of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition commented "I found myself in the climate stream with representatives of … Xstrata and Shell, yet not a single person from an environment non-government organisation. No one from Friends of the Earth, the Australian Conservation Foundation, Greenpeace, Climate Action Network Australia or any of the state conservation councils."