In March this year, a series of ‘expectations’ were announced that included “secure new and additional clean energy generation and/or storage to offset demand”. Since then, the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) has been tasked with figuring out what ‘new’, ‘additional’, and ‘clean’ all actually mean. You’ll find the industry’s greenwashing lifeline buried in these grey areas and jargon.
Things are not exactly looking up for Australia’s gas industry. One of the biggest reasons for this is a short-term boon turning into a long-term curse. Demand for gas turbines has skyrocketed, driven largely by demand from hyperscalers operating data centres in the United States. This is very bad: if those turbines get bought, built and eventually burn fossil fuels, their emissions will be country-sized.
10 of 20 articles
The single most amazing thing about carbon capture and storage (CCS) is how much time and money is spent examining something fossil fuel companies don’t actually want to work.
As I detailed in a recent report I led for Greenpeace Australia Pacific, the gas industry sees a real saviour in the prospect of the tech industry, and oversized data centres being massive demand sinks for all of their oversupplied fossil gas.
As I wrote in the first part of this series on Australia’s industrial emissions policy (the ‘safeguard mechanism’), there is simply no real restriction on high-polluting companies (mostly fossil fuel companies) covered under the scheme.
The “Safeguard Mechanism” sets declining targets for Australia’s biggest industrial emitters and fossil fuel mining projects (not including the emissions of coal and gas they sell), but also lets them “meet” those targets with a bunch of cheap cheats, like carbon offsets.
If you hear it as it’s told by Norway’s Ambassador to Australia, Anne Grete Riise, carbon capture and storage (CCS) has been a mind-blowing success over here where I live, in the land of brown cheese and black oil. But the interview paints a dangerously overstated view, failing to highlight the reality of how CCS has played out in Norway. Not only are we not a ‘best case’, but we also demonstrate the ways in which CCS can distract from real decarbonisation efforts.
Welcome to CCS week. Leaders in the carbon capture, transport, storage and utilisation industry are gathering at the “CO2CRC” conference in Melbourne.
In Q4 2024, the average wholesale earnings [RC5] of batteries discharging was higher than gas. In Q4 2025, that has flipped.
For decades, fossil fuel advocates have been pushing the line that we “need” to burn methane as a ‘vital component of the energy transition’. It is an ancient talking point, predicated on the idea that integrating wind and solar power can only be done by using fossil methane-fuelled turbines, which can be turned up and down with some degree of flexibility and adjustability.
