Environment Minister Greg Hunt should be investigated for misleading and deceptive conduct. He talks repeatedly about the potential to clean up our coal-fired power stations, reducing their emissions by 30-50%, by installing you-beaut Direct Injection Carbon Engines, when the technology is drastically underfunded, unavailable at scale, and has a colourful history of unsuccessful research sponsored for very many years by one of ICAC’s favourite miners, Travers Duncan.
The Direct Injection Carbon Engine, or DICE, is a big diesel of the kind used in ships, fuelled by a slurry of water and very fine coal with most of the ash taken out. Hunt was at it again yesterday, crowing about the passage through the Senate of legislation enabling him to set up a $2.55 billion emissions reduction fund, the centrepiece of the Direct Action plan, wording up reporters about the potential of DICE.
The key sentence is this: “DICE, the subject of a major research project at the CSIRO, can cut emissions from a coal station by up to half but is still at least five years from being ready to roll out.”
DICE is not a “major CSIRO research project”. There is a small team of two to four well-intentioned scientists and engineers working out of the CSIRO’s energy labs in Newcastle, running a 4-litre, single-cylinder diesel engine on coal, on a shoestring budget, struggling to find industry partners. “Ready to roll out” means a commercial-scale unit with a capacity of about 50MW — a tenth the size of a smallish power station — might exist by 2019-20, if trials on a prototype engine prove promising. Any roll-out worthy of the term is decades away.
As readers are aware from Crikey’s investigations here and here and here and here, culminating in this Background Briefing for ABC Radio National in July (to be re-broadcast this Sunday), DICE is the latest iteration of a long series of attempts to get the ash out of coal (by chemical leaching, or crushing the coal down to a fine powder and physically separating it), mix it with water and burn it as a liquid fuel.
The key sponsor of the research over more than 25 years was coal baron Travers Duncan, one of Australia’s richest men and chairman of listed White Energy, who was found to have behaved corruptly by ICAC after an investigation into its proposed acquisition of Cascade Coal, holder of a coal tenement at Mount Penny, which would have generated windfall gains for Cascade shareholders including Duncan and former New South Wales politician Eddie Obeid.
Back in 1987, when chaired by the late Neville Wran, the CSIRO partnered with Duncan and White Industries to develop an Ultra Clean Coal (UCC) that could be used as a liquid fuel — even injected into gas turbines or jet engines. Years of fruitless research followed, centered on trials at a UCC plant in Cessnock, later flogged off to Chinese miner Yancoal in 2009 and finally closed last year.
UCC had a forerunner too, a program called Supercoal, also supported by Wran when he was NSW premier, until it was exposed as a fraud in Parliament in 1980 by then-opposition spokesman on energy, and qualified coal engineer Ted Pickering, a key source for the Background Briefing program. UCC chewed up tens of millions of dollars in public and private funds, forever holding out the promise of public benefits like lower greenhouse gas emissions from coal and increased energy security, which never eventuated. My Background Briefing revealed the main commercial outcome of UCC was to give White an edge when tendering for the Moolarben coal mine.
Duncan is not involved in DICE, but the long back-story shows it would be unwise to put too much faith in the promise of clean coal as a liquid fuel, let alone shovel more public money into it as the federal government appears determined to do, with DICE featuring in the Energy Green Paper and affiliated companies sharing in $20 million of the grants made earlier this year. The most bizarre aspect of DICE is that, even if it succeeds in every respect, energy market experts reckon it isn’t competitive with technologies already available off the shelf. Wind energy, for example, is cheaper to build and run than a DICE engine and cuts greenhouse gas emissions by 100%. DICE is a glaring example of too little, too late.
Which seems to suit Greg Hunt just fine. If we had all century to tackle climate change, that might be OK. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has again warned, we don’t. DICE is simply not plausible at the front and centre of a national strategy to combat climate change in 2014.
37 thoughts on “No DICE: Greg Hunt deceives the public about ‘clean’ coal project”
Dogs breakfast
November 5, 2014 at 12:27 pmCarbon capture and clean coal are a myth that we the taxpayer pour hundreds of millions of dollars into so that multi-nationals can make huge profits which they shift to low-tax countries. Great for Australia.
I don’t know how much embedded carbon is in a wind turbine, but there certainly is an embedded cost. I am also aware that this argument is why nuclear power stations can never pay back their embedded carbon footprint.
So nuclear isn’t the answer either, unless they are already up and running.
JohnB
November 5, 2014 at 1:31 pm@Dog’s breakfast,
Lifetime carbon intensity of NEW energy sources, as reported for Australia by Uni of Sydney is below. See W’s isaDOTorgDOTusydDOTeduDOTau/publications/documents/ISA_Nuclear_ReportDOTpdf.
See page 172 for a tabulation, too extensive to repeat here, of comparative figures for various electrical energy technologies. You will probably be surprised.
Mark Duffett
November 5, 2014 at 1:42 pmWhile (as we’ve seen with wind) the exact quantum is contested, it’s absolutely not true that nuclear power stations can never pay back their embedded carbon footprint. The median lifetime, all-system analysis (for example at parliament.uk/briefing-papers/POST-PN-383.pdf) puts nuclear roughly on par with wind, and considerably less than solar photovoltaics.
Aidan Stanger
November 5, 2014 at 3:01 pmJohnB,
Although the abstract of that thesis has the figure of 7.96, that appears to be an error as that figure never appears in the body of the thesis. Instead it has the figure of 21.1, and nearly 30% of the energy invested figure is the assumed energy cost of shipping it from Denmark to New Zealand. For a locally made wind turbine this part of the energy cost would not be applicable, so the energy payback time would appear to be below a year.
JohnB
November 5, 2014 at 3:28 pmFair cop. So, not 7.96 but 5.5.
Still way more than 7 months payback period.
I had assumed that the supporting data would be in the appendices, not the main body of the report. I didn’t check them.
And it is only a Master’s thesis, so not peer reviewed in the usual sense of the term. There would be more authoritative and fresher stuff out there, but I didn’t want to send you off to, say, Brave New Climate for a second-hand discussion.
Thanks for following the link. Many would not do so.
Aidan Stanger
November 5, 2014 at 4:00 pmMark,
Think not 1884 but 1999: the fashion industry weren’t claiming that brown is black, but rather that brown had subsumed the function of black.
Fast forward to the present, and many of those in power are still obsessed with baseload, but it’s not what we need at all. We’re constantly generating a variable amount of electricity from renewables, so there’s no longer the requirement for something else to generate a constant amount of electricity. Instead we need more demand responsive electricity generation. DICE would be technically better suited to this than the existing coal fired generators, but I doubt it would ever be able to recoup its own infrastructure costs, let alone the research cost.
Roger Clifton
November 5, 2014 at 4:38 pmDICE, designed for internal combustion engines, would be an eligible replacement for diesel, which currently backs up intermittent sources all over the country.
Big loads need the efficiency of big thermal plants, preferably non-carbon.
Mark Duffett
November 5, 2014 at 5:55 pmAidan, I think I understand the principle of what you’re saying, but the extreme range of wind and solar generation is so great, and minimum demand levels so high, as not to sustain it.
decarbonisesa.com/2014/09/14/the-myth-of-the-myth-of-baseload/
JohnB
November 5, 2014 at 6:23 pmAidan, now you are trying to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Start with a system that works (2014), then push it in the direction of instability (falling down, say 2020). Then claim that the instability problem can be solved by use of GT or DICE or other carbon intensive means (the bootstraps, coming in 5 years – we are assured).
End result: Marginally adequate system stability, double the cost (1 x wind+solar, plus the same again in GT+DICE). Plus risks that come with unproven new technology, plus a CO2 emissions problem).
Better by far, methinks, is to use whatever works best and avoid the use of the term “Baseload”, which has become emotionally linked to an incorrect definition/assumption, which is that so-called baseload power cannot be ramped up and down to follow demand. In your words, “the requirement for something else to generate a constant amount of electricity”. That is poppycock – there is no such requirement. Every nuclear, lignite and black coal fired power plant in the world can load follow. The French nuclear power plant do this every day with 40 year old plant. Coal does it every day with up to 100 year old plant.
So, casting aside the meaningless term, baseload, we need a system which is responsive to load. NOT NECESSARILY THE OTHER WAY AROUND, which many wind+solar proponents assume is the natural order of things.
Wind and solar, therefore, are not of themselves adequate sources of energy to meet civilization’s demands/needs. Add the cost and footprint of whatever you propose to provide the “demand responsive” generation (your term).
Then re-do the maths of CO2, energy return and cost. For mine, nuclear appears to be a very good replacement for most of that which coal provides in Australia today and the sooner, the better. Our friends with wind or solar + DICE might even be able to rely on the load following ability of properly implemented nuclear power to manage demand.
System stability, including load following, can and should be achieved without resorting to the unproven dream called DICE.
Aidan Stanger
November 5, 2014 at 8:29 pmJohnB, where did you get the 5.5 figure?
You’d probably get more people following your links if you inserted them straight rather than writing DOT when you encounter one.
I don’t support pushing the system in the direction of instability. Indeed the reason SA has invested so heavily in renewables (compared with other states) is to solve the problem of instability that stemmed from the lack of generating capacity at the turn of the millennium.
We should be aiming for cheaper electricity, and renewables can provide this and are doing so to some extent. But without government intervention to provide cheap finance for renewables (which would make economic sense) more renewable electricity generation isn’t profitable without higher prices.
With the greater fluctuation of prices, it makes sense to have both supply and demand based responses.
I’m not sure you’re right about every nuclear power plant in the world being able to load follow — ISTR Britain’s gas cooled reactors aren’t responsive enough. But really my point was that we should install so much solar and wind that we won’t need to keep the fossil fuel generators running all the time.
I concur with your concluding sentence.