APPEA Chief Executive Belinda Robinson said the study’s findings reiterated the danger of enforcing a carbon tax on the LNG industry.
“If a cost is imposed on Australia’s LNG industry, global emissions will increase as a consequence of there being less natural gas available to replace more greenhouse-intensive fuels,”? she said.
“Selling our gas to the world is the most meaningful thing Australia can do to reduce global emissions and any policy that puts the brakes on Australia’s LNG potential will only deny the rest of the world a cleaner form of energy – at a time when demand has never been greater – and have the perverse effect of actually increasing global emissions.”?
The report found that CSG/LNG is significantly less greenhouse gas (GHG) intensive for most existing, commonly employed end-user combustion technologies and for most of the lifecycle scenarios considered.
The report states that CSG/LNG and coal have different emissions profiles. For the export situation considered, most GHG emissions from coal (94 per cent) will result from combustion in China, whereas extraction and processing in Australia accounts for only 2.7 per cent. For CSG the respective figures are 74 per cent and 22 per cent.
The report also found that:
A CSG-LNG project exporting 10 million tonnes of LNG per annum to China could avoid more than 32 million tonnes of global carbon dioxide emissions each year;
Over a 30-year project life, such a project could avoid 968 million tonnes of carbon dioxide; almost double Australia’s total annual greenhouse gas emissions.
The report’s executive summary can be found at: www.appea.com.au