David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I would like to concur with the member for Makin's comments. The London protocol has, as he explained, been in existence for some years, and we signed up a couple of decades ago. This inquiry looked in to the advisability of ratifying the amendments to the London protocol, particularly chapter 6, and I am really pleased to reinforce the comments that the member for Makin has made.

I was pleasantly surprised to hear that the transboundary transport of CO2 and subsequent storage and sequestration in subsea structures, commonly known as carbon capture and storage, is not some abstract research protocol; it's very advanced. There are 42 projects going on around the world. The biggest in the world is actually in Australia, and we have led the charge in this. There has been a 44 per cent increase in the amount of carbon capture and storage in the last year, and all of the projects around the world amount to 144 million tonnes per annum of carbon capture and storage. Norway, with its Northern Lights program, is very advanced.

Signing up to this amendment and ratifying it will mean we will also be able to help our trading partners and countries nearby, including Timor-Leste, which has an empty cavern that has run dry now—a perfect vehicle for this carbon capture and sequestration.

The other thing I learnt is it's not like there is a huge cavern that gets pumped into like a balloon. People explained to me prior to this wonderful inquiry that it would just slowly leak out again. Trust me, it's more like going into solid subsea geology, like honeycomb, where the oil and gas has been taken out. Once the compressed CO2, under huge pressure and force, gets down there, a kilometre or more underground, it's not going anywhere. It attaches to the subsea geology. It's there forever. That is a myth that this inquiry has cleared in my mind.

The IPCC Working Group III's contribution numbered AR6 2020-22 mentions that carbon capture and storage is a key necessity if global emissions targets are to be reached. There is no scenario they can see without us utilising it. So we will not only be able to give that to Timor Leste, by exporting the stuff captured in our gas projects from our Darwin hub but they will earn an income stream from it. It will also help our clean energy partners, Korea, Japan and Singapore. They need this because they don't have any geology to use that. Australia is blessed with lots of things that we do. The world is still hooked on fossil fuels; trillions of US dollars, trillions of British pounds, trillions of euros and trillions of everything have tried to get us off fossil fuels. It's a very hard act to follow, because fossil fuels have allowed a flowering of wealth and wellbeing around the world. But we have this problem and we want to fix it, so this is the perfect mix.

As I said, Norway is leading the charge on this. They are very advanced. We should sign up and ratify this because we need to make sure that we have the capacity for other countries, like those ones I mentioned, to do their bit. We already have carbon capture and things happening in Australia, and there are many more applications here. We have stuff down in the Otways, as well as up in the north-west of Australia. So I commend the report and I commend the intent of this. Like other things, we're never going to meet any target unless we have things like carbon capture and storage. And of course, there's the other missing link, not related to this inquiry, for us to embrace nuclear energy.

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