Thursday, 14 August 2025

Energy policy

Katherine COPSEY (Southern Metropolitan) (17:27): (1848) My adjournment matter is for the Premier. This week there was fresh reporting on Labor’s push to fund a carbon capture and storage (CCS) industry along Australia’s east coast. Alarmingly, the Victorian government continues to contribute public funds to this folly. The action I seek is for the Premier and Labor to stop throwing good money after bad, stop throwing public funds into carbon capture and storage, stop being champions for the fossil fuel industry. Instead, direct those funds to fully decarbonising Victoria, enabling us to meet our legislated renewable targets, retire coal and gas on schedule and invest in real, proven climate solutions that create long-term, secure jobs without locking communities and the planet into yet another generation of fossil fuel infrastructure.

Let us be clear: carbon capture and storage is not a feasible climate plan. It only extends fossil fuel use, wastes public money and delays the real work of electrifying industry and building renewables. Even its flagship projects underperform. Just a year ago it was reported that Chevron’s Gorgon CCS captured only about 30 per cent of the carbon it was supposed to. With costs rising to roughly $222 per tonne, it is hardly a wise use of scarce decarbonisation dollars. If any other initiative reported just a 30 per cent success rate, it would be defunded immediately. Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency has warned repeatedly that carbon capture cannot substitute for deep near-term cuts in fossil fuel use. Using carbon capture and storage as a permission slip to just continue business as usual will require implausible scale-up, and it will still fail to deliver the emission reductions that we need on the timeline required to avert climate catastrophe.

In Gippsland, CarbonNet’s proposal would drive a 100-kilometre CO₂ pipeline from Loy Yang to Golden Beach, with all the land use impacts and community concern that that entails, to again entrench fossil processes rather than to replace them. By contrast, Victoria already has a blueprint for genuine decarbonisation and legislated renewable and storage targets on a path to 95 per cent renewable electricity by 2035, alongside the revived SEC plans to build public renewables generation, transmission and storage. Every public dollar should accelerate that plan: rooftop and community batteries, grid-scale storage, offshore and onshore wind, solar, energy efficiency upgrades, industrial electrification and worker transition programs to support people in the valley and help get us away from fossil fuels, rather than just providing a fig leaf to prop up their continued use. So I say again to Labor and the Premier: end the waste, end the futile subsidies for carbon capture and storage that do not deliver and end the cheerleading for fossil fuels.