The Big Switch: Australia’s Electric Future

by Saul Griffith

When you burn a hydrocarbon fuel, the carbon atoms get oxidised with two oxygen atoms each, and the fuel is turned from a solid or a liquid into a gas – and gets about 5000 times bigger in the process. Even if you compress it back down into a liquid (which requires a huge amount of energy), the carbon still ends up three times bigger than when it came out of the ground as a fossil fuel. This means that to capture and store it, we would need to fill giant underground reservoirs, larger than the reservoirs it came out of in the first place. In its most recent report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) outlined the best-case scenario for CCS. It assumed burying huge amounts – 10 billion tonnes – a year of CO2. That is as many gigatonnes of stuff as the entire fossil-fuel industry currently rips out of the ground. It imagines an industry as large as the entire fossil-fuel industry to transport, process and bury CO2, and that this industry will somehow magically spring into being by 2050.