ONE night in 1986, the people living around Cameroon's Lake Nyos went to bed as they normally did.
In the morning, about 1800 of them didn't wake up. They'd been suffocated by a thick blanket of carbon dioxide. The lake's silty bottom had been trapping vast quantities of carbon dioxide coming out of volcanic springs.
Rainfall combined with Murphy's law to disturb the silt and release the carbon dioxide.
Half a world away, the Victorian Government has set aside more than $130 million to capture and bury the carbon dioxide emissions produced by brown coal electricity generators.
The government calls this process CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage). Others have described it as STB (Subterranean Time Bombs).
The big idea is to pump carbon dioxide into underground caves, some of which have been emptied by oil and gas drilling and others vacated by nature.
The Otway Basin is believed to have prime carbon-dumping geology, so one of these gas graves is being tried near Warrnambool. The next trial will probably occur in Gippsland's offshore oilfields. Residents near this current experiment are entitled to wonder how truthful the Government has been.
Generally speaking, geological science has been developed primarily through efforts to extract gas, not to store it.
Knowledge of the deep layers of the earth is still heavily reliant on scientific conjecture. Accordingly, there is no absolute guarantee that this poisonous gas will stay put.
On present estimates, hundreds of millions of tonnes of gas might need to be stored forever.
Yet no one can categorically say these geological pockets will remain leak-proof against carbon dioxide.
Further, no one can say for certain that these gas graves will not be affected by earthquakes that could conceivably release decades or centuries worth of carbon dioxide into a stressed global atmosphere.
The Cameroon catastrophe was an entirely natural phenomenon and was not related to human efforts to store carbon dioxide.
But the behaviour of the carbon dioxide upon its release is entirely relevant to the Victorian risk.
Central to the problem is the Government's stubborn adherence to the view that dirty brown coal can be turned into a source of green energy.
The publicity also suggests that persevering with brown coal power is more sensible than developing a serious solar energy industry.
Every solution to global warming will involve risk.
The Government should not assume that Victorians are not intelligent enough to have an open and informed discussion about those risks.
Alternatively, the Government will be seen as kowtowing to the brown coal electricity industry and its absentee landlords while giving priority to foreign investment over future generations of Victorians.
The Government should be careful.
It might find carbon dioxide in the same place it's buried its head.
Dark cloud over carbon call
