HOLY SMOKE – hang on, make that unholy smoke – NewGenCoal has risen from the ashes of clean coal!
You've got to be kidding me. The Australian Coal Association's (ACA) latest push to make burning fossils acceptable should have been called NewGenCon.
Desperate to give as much oxygen as possible to the planet warping coal-fired electricity industry, the ACA has embarked on a multi-million dollar marketing campaign.
Contrary to everything it has ever denied about global warming, the ACA now protests that burning coal is bad for the environment but, hey, it is doing more than most to fix climate change by conjuring carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology or NewGenCoal. Yeah, right.
This month, the ACA has made a number of statements that blur the issue of whether CCS will be viable in time to stop catastrophic global warming.
Very few experts other than those working on CCS projects believe the technology can be successful, let alone become a cost-effective commercial proposition soon enough to help economies reduce emissions.
But that won't stop the ACA trying to hawk the concept. It has commissioned polling company UMR to explore perceptions about the coal industry's new-found green credentials.
UMR found that "there is little knowledge about what the coal industry is doing to reduce CO2 emissions from the burning of coal".
Here's why: So far, the coal industry has not succeeded in significantly reducing CO2 emissions from the burning of coal.
Sure a couple of demo plants may have "captured" insignificant amounts of CO2, but not enough to matter.
UMR also found that "there is little understanding of the effectiveness of low emission coal technologies and the contribution that they can make to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Australia and in countries like China and India".
Here's why: there are no low emission coal technologies functioning at a commercial scale, therefore, such technologies are not drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Australia or any where else.
ACA boasts that "Australia is at the forefront of the development of these technologies".
Here's why: No other economy is as dependent on coal exports as ours, so why would anyone else feel the same imperative to lead?
Most other overseas jurisdictions have retreated from investing the fortunes needed to prove the concept.
ACA makes much of Energy Minister Martin Ferguson's official opening last week of the CCS experiment dubbed the Callide Project, in Queensland.
What it fails to say is that this technology, which will retrofit the coal-fired boiler at the Callide A Power station, will not be able to safely store any captured carbon dioxide on site.
Instead, the compressed CO2 from the plant will be transported 200 km by road to an underground storage facility.
Pity the motorist who happens to be on the tail of the semi moving this deadly substance from point A to point B with a tired truckie at the wheel on a dark and rainy night.
And if pigs fly and NewGenCoal is developed to scale, pity the energy users who will have to pay through the nose for electricity that has CCS overheads to recover.
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