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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

In recent years Australia has become one of the largest exporters of gas in the world.

The industry’s massive expansion has been supported by federal and state governments, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s roadmap to net zero emissions including ongoing support for gas mining.

But is growing gas exports really compatible with our goal to reduce emissions and prevent runaway climate change?

Today journalist and contributor to The Saturday Paper Marian Wilkinson on how the gas lobby is shaping Australia’s climate policies and the unproven technology the industry is relying on.

It’s Thursday, November 4.

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Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“Australians want a plan that gets the balance right, and our plan to reach what will be our new official target of reaching net zero emissions by 2050. Our plan gets the balance right. Our plan charts a uniquely Australian way.”

RUBY:

Marian, let's begin with the plan that the government recently announced to deliver net zero by 2050. They're calling it the Australian way. So what is the ‘Australian Way’ and what can we deduce about who had input into forming this plan?

Marian:

I think the Australian way is a code for the fact that we are going to protect our fossil fuel industries for as long as we possibly can. The government has made it clear, Angus Taylor, Scott Morrison and of course, the Nationals have made it clear that they don't want to shift to 2050 too quickly. And one of the reasons for that is they don't want to put a lot of pressure on Australia's fossil fuel exports just yet.

And what you can see in there is, yes, there's a lot of input from bureaucrats, from political stakeholders, from industry stakeholders, as they're called. But there's a few industry stakeholders whose voice seems to be very loud.

And one of those very loud stakeholder voices, in my view, is the gas industry. Santos, being among one of the most important and Santos's boss is, of course, the chair of the gas lobby, as it's known APPEA. And of course, the gas lobby has been pushing for particular technologies that they're keen to have in the plan.

RUBY:

Ok so the head of Santos - the same person who also heads up the industry body APPEA - can you tell me more about them? Who are they?

Marian:

The guy's name is Kevin Gallagher, and in the industry, he's very well known.

Archival tape -- Kevin Santos:

“Hello. I'm Kevin Gallagher, Santos, managing director and CEO. Welcome to this presentation of Santos’ 2021 half year results.”

Marian:

He hails from Scotland. He's a very bright guy, and he has had a lot of wins in the last year or so.

Archival tape -- Kevin Santos:

“I'm pleased to present another strong set of financial results that demonstrate the strength of our disciplined, low cost operating model. Last year…”

Marian:

Santos has managed to get its Narrabri development off the ground in New South Wales.

Archival tape -- Kevin Santos on ABC:

“This project will be well executed and will be responsibly developed to avoid damaging the environment and be very good for the prosperity of the region.”

Marian:

There was a lot of objections to that, especially by environmentalists, by farmers, and even the former chief scientist had objected to that project because of its big greenhouse footprint and its impact on water.

Archival tape -- Kevin Santos:

“There will be a significant demand from emitting countries that lack Australia's competitive advantage and carbon storage.”

Marian:

He's also had a very big win on pushing carbon capture and storage, which is the technology that the industry believes is going to essentially cut the concerns of both the public and investors about the big emissions footprint of the gas industry.

And the gas lobby has become a lot more important than, say, it was a decade ago. And what's really interesting about this is that strangely, it was the Paris Agreement on climate change back in 2015 that gave the gas lobby a huge boost.

And that was because for a lot of people, for a lot of investors, Paris really did say that thermal coal power generated from coal was going to be on the way out. And as the gas industry saw it, this was going to be their golden moment because they were going to move into that space. The problem is, if you look at what science is telling us about climate change, gas has got a very short window of opportunity to be in that space. But they're trying to make the most of it while they can.

RUBY:

Right ok - so this recent expansion in gas mining and exporting is actually coming at the expense of coal, and it seems the gas industry’s political influence has risen at the same time. How do you see that influence playing out when it comes to the federal government’s plan to reduce our emissions?

Marian:

Well, I think there's no doubt the emphasis in the plan on this technology carbon capture and storage and carbon capture utilisation and storage both complicated phrases. But it's a technology that first the coal industry pushed and now the gas industry is pushing.

Archival tape -- Kevin Santos on Sky:

“What makes us excited about this is that we have vast reservoirs that will be taking oil and gas out of around Australia for the last 50 years or so that offer us the opportunity to store up to 300 million tonnes per annum.”

Marian:

If you look back at Kevin Gallagher's speeches over the last year or more, they're fascinating because they really are. He's almost evangelical in pushing the case for this technology.

Archival tape -- Kevin Santos on Sky:

“And so it's a great opportunity not only for Santos, but for Australia to be at the leading edge of this technology and make a meaningful impact on emissions reduction.”

Marian:

In his vision, you know, we can be burying Australia's emissions from producing LNG throughout various deep gas reservoir basins all over Australia and off the coast of Australia.

Archival tape -- Kevin Santos CommSec talk:

“Santos is looking at a one point seven million tonnes per annum project in the Cooper Basin, which not only will capture 1.7 million tonnes of CO2 and store it permanently and then hence reducing emissions by that same amount. But we have the potential to store up to 20 million tonnes per annum.”

Marian:

Now that thinking has a big place in the plan. It's one of the five technologies that Taylor and Morrison have really identified in this plan, as they did a year ago with the road map to technology.

But something else happened in the last month, really, that has pushed this along. That's because Australia has a carbon credit scheme basically for trading carbon offsets. That is, if your industry is very desks and you want to reduce your emissions. I'm saying this simplistically, but this is what it is. You know, you can buy carbon credits from someone who's doing a reforestation project, for example.

A month ago, it was announced that Angus Taylor was doing a world first. He was going to include this carbon capture and storage technology in Australia's carbon trading system. Now this is a world first, and it's something that Gallaghers really pushed for. It's something the gas lobbies really push for, and they think that this is going to, I believe, influence both the buyers of our LNG and investors that this industry can keep going well into the future.

RUBY:

We’ll be back after this.

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RUBY:

Marian, we’ve been talking about the gas lobby - and their involvement, or influence in developing the net-zero by 2050 plan that Australia is taking to Glasgow. But can you tell me more about how the gas industry is proposing to expand while also reducing emissions? What - according to them - does that look like, exactly?

Marian:

Yeah. So what the plan sets out is that there's five basins, if you like in Australia and offshore from Australia, where these emissions might potentially be stored. The Cooper Basin in South Australia, the Sirak Base and the Gippsland Basin of Victoria. And the basin off W.A. and North Western Australia, west of Darwin. So these are the sites that have been identified.

Now this technology has been a fraught technology for decades. And the reason is not because you can't physically do this. And indeed, Chevron and the big gas producer in north Western Australia is doing this at this very moment for its Gorgon project. The problem is, can you do it economically? Can you do it in a way where this technology doesn't break down? Can you do it in a way where you can monitor that the emissions don't leak over the next century, which is what you'd have to do.

And for all these reasons, I think most analysts say outside the gas industry and outside the Australian government, this is a very hard ask. To get people to believe that this technology can work on a big scale. It's just too costly and too fraught.

RUBY:

Right, so given that Marian, given the difficulty and the cost of this technology - how realistic is the plan at all? If carbon capture and storage is underpinning it - then is it actually viable?

Marian:

Well, I think that the realistic answer is I don't think it can make it in time. It's pretty clear from the UN reports from the IPCC report in August that time is not on the gas industry’s side. The reality is that if we want to try and hold the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees from pre-industrial levels and this is supposedly the mission that Glasgow is trying to achieve, the gas industry essentially has to start declining by the end of this decade. Not expanding. And I think that's the problem for the gas industry. The scientific reality is catching up with them.

And I think if you look at what's been happening this year, there's been this almost cheer squad of ministers. Not only Angus Taylor…

Archival tape -- Angus Taylor:

“We're still going to have gas as an important part of the mix for many, many years to come and that's appropriate.”

Marian:

but Keith Pitt, the resources minister.

Archival tape -- Keith Pitt:

“We think gas as a transition will be a very important part of the economic recovery, particularly for manufacturing.”

Marian:

And Labor ministers I have to say like the Northern Territory Labour leader who have been out there parading this future for gas, which includes new developments in the Northern Territory, new developments in Queensland, expanded projects in Western Australia.

Archival tape -- Mark McGowan, WA Premier:

“I don't want to see what happened in the eastern states where they have bedlam and mayhem, where they don't have sufficient gas supplies.”

Marian:

And I just find it hard to believe that they really believe themselves this is going to happen.

The rhetoric around the gas industry in Australia and its glorious future just does not sit with the scientific reality of where we have to go on climate change.

RUBY:

Mm. And the fact that this is the path that the federal government is pursuing, what does that say to you about the integrity of our commitment to combating climate change, particularly at a time in which the world is gathered in Glasgow, at COP 26?

Marian:

Well, if the aim of COP26 is keeping 1.5 alive, I don't think it sits with that at all. If one was a political cynic, you could say what it does sit with is the next couple of cycles of the elections in Australia.

These politicians who are making the decisions today are basically focused, I think, on their re-election. And by the time this plan, such as it is, is tested, they will probably long be gone from office.

So I think that in a way is the tragedy of Australia is that we tend to produce these plans for election cycles and we actually have to produce them for the long term.

RUBY:

Marian, thank you so much for your time.

Marian:

Thank you.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today,

The federal government has confirmed it will not join US President Joe Biden’s international plan to control methane, a highly polluting greenhouse gas.

Over 90 countries pledged to limit global methane emissions by 30% by the end of the decade at the Glasgow climate summit.

And in Western Australia, four year old Cleo Smith who had been missing in remote WA for 18 days has been found by police and is now reunited with her parents.

Smith was found 75 kilometers from where her family was camping inside a locked house in the coastal town of Carnarvon on Wednesday. A 36-year-old man is in police custody.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See ya tomorrow.