Clean Energy Australia - A Review

Clean energy has become flavour of the month with one of Australia's energy giants and aminnow benefitting from the Coalition's pre-election largesse.

Hot-rocks hopeful Petratherm, one of several South Australian companies exploring for hot-rock geothermal energy, with the ultimate objective of providing energy for producing electricity, was promised $50million yesterday for its Paralana project.

Santos was promised $10 million for its Moomba carbon storage project, which the company is promoting as the biggest geosequestration prospect in the world.

Geothermal energy is one of the few renewable energy sources, either from natural hot springs or through inducing high temperature rocks to generate steam for turbines.

The commitment of taxpayer funds nearly doubles the amount the federal Government has previously committed to the development of thermal energy.

Petratherm's Paralana project was one of a number assessed by Origin Energy earlier this year before it decided to inject up to $150 million in the rival Geodynamic's Habenero plant near Innamincka.

Petratherm plans to build a30 megawatt power station atParalana in the Flinders Rangers costing $152 million with the prospect it could be expanded ultimately to 512MW.

Resources Minister Ian Macfarlane said hot-rock energy was one of the most exciting new technologies in the world.

"It promises to deliver baseload power without any greenhouse gas emissions," he said.

Santos, Australia's second-largest oil and gas company, was promised $10 million to help fund its front-end engineering and design studies for the demonstration phase of its plan to bury carbon dioxide 7.6km underground in the depleted Tirrawarra oil and gas fields in the Cooper Basin near Moomba.

Santos will match the federal funding to fast-track development of the concept so that a final investment decision can be taken by mid next year.

Santos managing director John Ellice-Flint said development of the Moomba carbon storage would help Australia's emergence as a world leader in carbon sequestration.

Mr Ellice-Flint said the project could begin injecting CO2 in 2010 at the rate of a million tonnes a year.

If the demonstration phase was successful, Moomba would be scaled up to serve as a regional carbon storage hub serving coal-fired power generators in eastern Queensland and the Hunter Valley in NSW.

It was projected that 20 million tonnes of CO2 a year could be stored at Moomba over 50 years.

By: Nigel Wilson

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