Excluding agriculture won’t get us to net zero emissions. But a few policy tweaks could transform Australia’s 400 million hectares of farmland into net consumers of carbon sequestered into the soil.
10 February 2021
The last carbon capture and storage (CCS) coal plant in the United States, the Texas-based Petra Nova, will shut down indefinitely from June after operators deemed it no longer economic.
Petra Nova, which captures carbon dioxide emissions and stores them under ground, has been a beacon of hope for the coal industry, which saw it as an example of how carbon-heavy fossil fuel could continue to play a role in a decarbonised world.
The Petra Nova plant, though, was hardly climate friendly. The CO2 that it captured was piped 82 miles away to an oil field, where it was pumped underground. The gas displaced oil, which the operators, a joint venture of NRG Energy and Japan’s JX Nippon, then extracted and sold.
Australia could be down to just one refinery producing petrol, diesel, jet fuel and other petroleum products for the local market by the middle of the year.