COP28 deal confirms what Australia already knows: coal is out of vogue and out of time
My latest piece in The Conversation
At the COP28 climate summit in Dubai this week, nations agreed to “transition away” from coal, oil and gas . After 30 years of COP meetings, the world has finally committed to weaning itself from these carbon-based drivers of climate change.
As Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen told the media, the deal “sends a signal to the world’s markets, investors and businesses that this is the direction of travel for countries right around the world.”
This COP statement is the first to name and shame all carbon-based fuels driving the climate crisis – not just coal, which has been mentioned in previous COP agreements, but also oil and gas.
The deal is a collective global aspiration rather than a legally binding agreement. Even so, it should put an end to the idea that burning carbon – both in Australia and elsewhere – can continue on a significant scale beyond 2050.
Renewables on the rise
The statement on carbon-based fuels is significant, but largely symbolic. In Australia, coal as a fuel has long been on the way out. Improved domestic energy efficiency has reduced energy consumption, even as the economy has grown. Most of this has come at the expense of coal – a trend likely to continue as electricity generation moves further towards renewables.
As the below table shows, starting from a base of almost zero, solar and wind energy generation has risen at startling annual rates over the last decade: 30% for solar and 15% for wind. Although shares of total energy consumption are still fairly small, these growth rates imply solar and wind will generate more energy than coal by the end of the decade.
Australia’s consumption of oil, mostly in the form of imported petrol and diesel fuel, has remained largely steady over the past decade. Successive federal governments have dithered on the transition to electric vehicles. But if Australia is to get anywhere near the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, it must now tackle the transport sector which in 2022 produced 19% of Australia’s emissions – more than half from passenger and light commercial vehicles.
Given the absence of a domestic motor vehicle industry in Australia, the current government’s inaction on electric vehicles is surprising. It appears driven in part by a fear of populist campaigns by the Coalition and others about the effects on motorists. Who could forget claims in 2019 by then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison that electric vehicles would “end the weekend […] It’s not going to tow your trailer. It’s not going to tow your boat. It’s not going to get you out to your favourite camping spot” – claims since proven to be incorrect.
Also in play is the political lobbying power of the retail motor industry, backed by foreign car manufacturers keen to maintain a market for their remaining supply of petrol-driven vehicles.
The myth of carbon capture and storage
The final text also called for the acceleration of “zero and low emission technologies”. Controversially, this includes removal technologies such as carbon capture and storage, which involves trapping, transporting and storing greenhouse gas emissions from facilities such as coal-fired power stations and gas plants.
The inclusion of this technology was criticised by many observers as a loophole which would allow polluting, inefficient industries to continue. But it is better understood as a symbolic sop to the coal, oil and gas industries, which have long pinned their hopes of staying in business on the idea of burying the carbon they emit.
In reality, carbon capture and storage is a proven failure. The Gorgon gas project on the Barrow Island nature reserve, off Western Australia’s Pilbara coast, has stored barely a third of the targeted amount of carbon, forcing the proponents to buy carbon offsets instead (themselves a dubious option). Similarly, the only operating project capturing emissions from a coal-fired power plant, at Boundary Dam in Canada, has under-performed on carbon capture capacity by a huge margin.
So while carbon-capture is theoretically available as an option for new projects, in most cases it will prove either technically impossible or economically infeasible.
Read more: Electric utes can now power the weekend – and the work week
Australia faces a choice on energy exports
The COP28 statement’s call for an “urgent and equitable transition to renewable energy” presents opportunities for Australia. As Bowen acknowledged:
Australia wants to be a renewable energy powerhouse, we want to create the energy for ourselves, and for our region and for the world […] The COP decision today gives us a very good ecosystem in which to develop that plan.
But of course, “that plan” is totally inconsistent with the plans of the coal and gas industries, which are announcing new projects intended to operate well into the second half of this century. By backing these projects, the federal government is essentially betting that the aspirations of the COP28 statement will turn out to be just wishful thinking, and that Australia can profit from a world of catastrophic global heating.
Australia must now decide what kind of energy superpower it wants to be: the home of a sustainable future, or the last refuge of coal and gas extraction.
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Afternoon PJQ,
Good to see you contributing to the debate - any plans to return to Twitter/X? Your presence is missed there. What are your impressions of other platforms?
Re: COP28 deal confirms what Australia already knows: coal is out of vogue and out of time
'the world has finally committed to weaning itself from these carbon-based drivers of climate change'
Q- what are the ramifications of not going along with the commitment?
'Australia must now decide what kind of energy superpower it wants to be: the home of a sustainable future, or the last refuge of coal and gas extraction.'
'Given the absence of a domestic motor vehicle industry in Australia, the current government’s inaction on electric vehicles is surprising. It appears driven in part by a fear of populist campaigns by the Coalition and others about the effects on motorists.'
These paragraphs make it seem like you think that Australian governments have a choice. Well maybe a future one will in 2025 hopefully eg. minority Labor with many Teals/Indies, but at the moment isn't it a duopoly controlled by corporations & the Murdochracy ( I know you don't think they hold much sway, but many commentators do).
Be good to get your opinion on the 2party Lib/Lab mutualism.
Thanks, cheers
Agree on the main points, but not energy exports. Apart from microstates, most countries have enough renewable resources to meet their own energy needs without incurring long-distance transport costs and exposing themselves to the demonstrably high political and economic risks of trade dependency. The default and baseline solution is energy autarky. From that starting-point, many countries will find that comparative-advantage trade in energy with neighbours, overwhelmingly in the weightless form of electricity, will save them money at acceptably low risks, as within Europe (here including the UK) and North America. There won’t be any energy superpowers in a renewable world, and good riddance to them.
Australia has only one suitable neighbour for energy trade, New Zealand, which has plentiful cheap hydro at home, and it's too far for an HVDC cable to be worthwhile. Who else can Australian solar energy be sold to? Indonesia is cloudy, so its solar power will be more expensive, but the cost of HVDC cables across a deep oceanic trench will be very high, and Indonesia is not exactly a close ally. Then there is Japan. It has poor solar resources like the UK, and a similar irrational objection to onshore wind, though plenty of ocean for out-of-sight floating wind farms.
The dream for Australian promoters is to export hydrogen, matching a similar delusion by Japanese officials and corporations. The obstacles are immense, and the dreams depend on massive and irrational subsidies. Hydrogen is even harder to ship than fossil gas: you either have to use very high pressures or very low temperatures, both costly and quite risky. Hydrogen is simply too dangerous for heating buildings, let alone cooking. For transport, hydrogen fuel-cell cars have decisively lost the market battle with BEVs, unsurprisingly so as inserting two lossy conversions from and to electricity in the pathway creates a large and unavoidable drop in comparative efficiency.
I go along with Mike Barnard’s conclusion that in a green economy hydrogen has just two assured future markets, for chemical reasons rather than energy ones: virgin ironmaking and nitrogenous fertiliser. He is rather bearish on the volumes, a nerdy dispute we can leave aside for now. Since hydrogen is a pig to transport, and can readily be made by electrolysis anywhere you have both sunshine and water, there is a strong case for reducing iron ore near the mines. I don’t know enough about fertiliser to have an opinion on it. The main iron ore ones are currently in Western Australia and the Brazilian Amazon, which tick the boxes, though Namibia and Mauretania may weirdly have futures as industrial powers. In addition, shipping iron pellets rather than ore saves 40% of the weight. Building hydrogen DRI plants near Pilbara may not turn out to be optimal, but is certainly a better bet than shipping both ore and hydrogen in separate carriers to identical DRI plants in Japan. Technically Australia could go further downstream and add the electric furnaces to make steel, but the payoff is less obvious. Unlike iron, steel is a differentiated product and there is a lot to be said for staying closer to the customers.
In the long history of humanity up to the Industrial Revolution, energy supplies, though scant, were local and sustainable: wind- and water-mills, sails, firewood, and the labour of draught animals and humans themselves. Towns and cities had to be supplied with firewood, which came from fairly local coppiced forests. Gilgamesh had to venture far into Anatolia to find intact cedar forests to plunder, against the strong opposition of the indigenous deity Humbaba, but that was for much scarcer construction timber for ships, temples and palaces. IIRC the transition to technically inferior coal was forced on English ironmasters around 1700 AD by deforestation – there wasn’t enough wood left, and transport costs limited Nordic timber, plentiful then as now, to high-value uses like shipbuilding. For a mere three centuries we have foolishly been running our economies wastefully on unsustainable and climate-wrecking fossil fuels. That nasty interlude will come to an end in the next 20 years, tapping the sun as well as the winds. Goodbye coal, goodbye oil, goodbye fossil gas. And good riddance to you too.