The heat is on

Bulletin with Newsweek
Tuesday 17/10/2006, Page: 21

THE SUN IS A GOLDEN ORB beating unmercifully upon endless red earth. Black bushflies, clouds of them, torment the few men who venture into the open. A steel contraption, a drilling platform, sprouts from a bit of a basin in the vast flatness, and there is a scattering of demountable huts.

It seems an unpromising setting in which to imagine a great power plant generating most of the energy required to run all of Australia's streetlights, air- conditioners and its entire industrial complex.

Yet here, close to Cooper's Creek, just east of the spot where Burke and Wills perished and not far from the tree on which one of the explorers' companions carved that desolate word Dig, men are doing new digging. More correctly, they are drilling, seeking a treasure beyond price: natural heat.

More than 3km below the red dust slumbers fractured granite that would burn the flesh off a body in an instant. The rock maintains a constant temperature of 250°C. The reason is simple: ancient deposits of uranium and other radioactive elements release energy in the form of heat as they gradually decay.

The men doing the drilling are in the business of capturing that heat, bringing it to the surface in the form of superheated water and, in the future, using its energy to run power stations.

In short, they want to create Australia's first large-scale geothermal power plant - a sort of "green" nuclear energy factory.

One of those men out there on the desert swatting flies is federal Environment Minister Ian Campbell. He is a greenhouse convert - a man in search of alternatives to the clouds of carbon dioxide spewing into the Earth's atmosphere and threatening everything from the future of humanity to the ambitions of politicians like him.

The youthful Campbell has been Environment Minister for only two years. At 47, he has realised his early aspiration. Asked at the age of 18 by a lecturer in a business course at the West Australian Institute of Technology to list his life goals, he wrote: to become a cabinet minister. Ambition continues to burn within him.

Though he won't fall into the trap of declaring he wants to become prime minister, he is perfectly happy to reveal he would like to become treasurer some day. He would also like to move from the Senate to the House of Representatives, although he remains short of a seat because Liberal power players in his home state of WA continue to deny him the chance of pre-selection.

First, though, he has to prove himself in what is rapidly becoming one of the nation's most confronting political tasks.

When Prime Minister John Howard gave him his cabinet seat in 2004, Campbell was what he calls a "constructive sceptic" on climate change and global warming. "I was probably agnostic on the subject when I came to the portfolio," he says. "But once you start focusing all your attention on the science, it becomes pretty hard to ignore." Indeed, he now declares that climate change is by far the biggest challenge facing the world. If people like him don't get it right, he says, the Earth will fry.

He happily encourages people to see former US Democrat presidential candidate Al Gore's alarming film of a world facing environmental cataclysm because of global warning, An Inconvenient Truth. The film, Campbell says, defines clearly the problems facing the world, though it is short on solutions.

It depicts the Arctic gradually melting, sea levels rising and the Earth struggling to survive with a climate twisted by an overload of carbon dioxide. Campbell says the problems are so great that "you can get depressed and you can get forlorn" just contemplating them. But he is not of that bent: he wants to help save the planet.

Indeed, listen to him laying out what he believes Australia and the world must do over the next 50 years and you might reach the conclusion that he has become radicalised. Radical, however, sits uneasily and Campbell, a man of the right, calls himself a "compassionate conservative".

A couple of days after The Bulletin travelled to outback Australia with the minister to consider a future potentially powered by hot rocks, the Lowy Institute released research showing that Australians now ranked the environment - and its marquee topic, global warming - at the top of their worries.

Almost 90% declared that the preservation of the global environment should be Australia's most important foreign policy goal, ahead of terrorism. A remarkable 68% of respondents to the Lowy poll rated global warming as a "critical threat" to our vital interests over the next 10 years, and one on which they wanted action even if it causes economic pain.

Only international terrorism - at 73% - and the danger of hostile nations acquiring nuclear weapons (70%) were considered greater threats. Very few Australians shilly-shallied on their view: only 1% registered a "don't know" about climate change. On that ranking, Campbell ought to be one of the most powerful cabinet ministers, shaded only by the PM, the treasurer, the foreign affairs minister and the defence minister.

Few political observers would consider that to be the case, though - Campbell is seen around Canberra as something of a new boy, despite having spent almost 17 years in federal parliament and more than 10 on the frontbenches. He was a parliamentary secretary for seven years, and spent less than a year in the outer ministry, overseeing local government, territories and roads, before being catapulted in July 2004 to environment.

Since then, only two issues have brought him a significant public profile. He emerged quickly as a friend to whales, fighting for a world-wide ban on whaling, and he faced down the Victorian government and the windfarm industry, halting a wind project known as Bald Hills in the now-famous cause of the orange-bellied parrot.

On global warning, he inherited the Howard government's obstinate, years-old refusal to ratify the green movement's emblematic international agreement, the Kyoto Protocol.

Surrounding him are cabinet ministers with competing interests: Ian McFarlane in Industry and Resources, who is committed to seeing through Australia's minerals boom; Nick Minchin in Finance, whose job is to guard government money; Peter McGauran in Agriculture, who needs to keep energy burning farmers happy. And from the side, Malcolm Turnbull, building his political future as a quasi-minister for water.

Campbell declares himself onside with all these interests. The Kyoto Protocol, he says, is effectively coming to an end and even though Australia didn't sign up, it is one of the few countries that is meeting the target it set for carbon emissions: an increase of only 8% from 1990 to 2011, at a time when the economy has doubled.

Kyoto is no longer treated seriously by many countries "and the whole world is talking about what to do post-Kyoto", he claims. "Some people ask why don't we just sign up and get it over and done with, but I would see that as a huge moral hazard - it's a slogan, not a solution, and it doesn't reduce greenhouse gases. Signing Kyoto is a crock - it's an excuse for not having a proper debate." As to the criticism that Australia's absence from the Kyoto community means it has no seat at the world anti-greenhouse table, Campbell points to the international dialogue being conducted under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Australia, he says, has two seats at that table, where the world is trying to agree to long-term greenhouse controls among both developed and developing nations.

Australia's Howard Bamsey - deputy of Campbell's department, Environment Australia
- is co-chair of the 189-member dialogue, representing the developed world. South Africa represents the developing world. Australia is also permanent leader of what is known as "the Umbrella Group", whose members include Japan, Russia, Canada, Norway, New Zealand and the United States.

At home, Campbell rejects pressure from many environmental groups to place a price, or a tax, on carbon emissions as a step towards forcing industry to clean up its own act. It would, he argues, act as a brake on economic growth. His core political belief, he says, starts from the proposition that "government is too big and taxes are too high". He's not about to propose any new taxes.

Instead, Campbell oversees about $2bn of federal government climate change funds available for investment in low-emission technologies. He boasts that on a per capita basis, this is more than any other country.

Critics point out that on a per capita basis, Australia emits more greenhouse gases than any other country, too. Renewable energy advocates also argue that lack of any penalty for carbon emitters is a positive disincentive to those who want to invest in low-emission technologies.

Any industry faces penalties for polluting waterways with toxic substances, but there remains no defined level for carbon pollution, which means no carbon cost is factored into the price of electricity. Renewable industries start from behind the coal base line.

The government's decision almost a decade ago to set a Mandatory Renewal Energy Target at 2% - supposed to effectively boost the share of renewable energy to 12.5% of all energy consumed in Australia by 2010 - has also come unstuck. The target was set at 9500 gigawatt-hours, which was the best estimate in 1997 of what an additional 2% would be in 2010 of total annual electricity sales. The estimate was wrong, because strong economic growth resulted in an increase in energy use and much of that energy growth is supplied from fossil fuels. The 2% target is now in effect a -2% target: the renewable energy industries' total share of the national electricity market now sits at about 8%.

Campbell, however, remains upbeat, pointing to a large number of projects receiving funding to reduce the nation's reliance on carbon-emitting energy.

Adelaide was recently declared the first "solar city" in Australia; a $52m program paying citizens to place photovoltaic cells on their roofs, linking households into a solar power station, has been over-subscribed; $100m was made available for research and development of greenhouse abatement technologies; grants have gone to dozens of renewable energy projects in remote communities.

The list is long, though few new projects are coming on-stream. Most of the money has already been earmarked. Which is why we are standing in the hot desert near Innamincka, the borders of South Australia, NSW and Queensland not far away.

Campbell wants - and needs - to demonstrate that his government's approach holds serious promise. The government provided $5m research and development seed money for a company called Geodynamics to set about proving it could tap the heat of ancient fractured rock far beneath the red earth in the quest of perfectly carbon-free electricity generation.

No electricity has yet been generated, but the company has successfully listed on the stock exchange, returned the government's money and is planning to build a small demonstration power plant soon. According to Geodynamics' founding director, Dr Doone Wyborn, the company could exploit the thermal anomaly that lies beneath 1000 sqkm in the Cooper Basin to generate enough electricity to power much of Australia.

The system is deceptively simple. Water is injected deep into the earth, squeezing open fractures in hot granite, which sits beneath an ancient "thermal blanket". This fluid, superheated after circulating through the fractures, returns to the surface through other drill holes and its heat is extracted through a conventional heat-exchange system. This in turn heats liquid with a lower boiling point, which is "flashed" into vapour to turn turbines. The fluid from the ground - kept under pressure so it never evaporates - is returned to the depths in a constant loop.

Wyborn says the heat within the rocks will eventually cool, and a geothermal plant relying on holes 5km deep would continue operating for 65 years. This could be doubled by drilling another kilometre.

Campbell is excited by the potential because he believes all the current projects to reduce greenhouse gases to acceptable levels while also producing enough electricity to maintain economic growth will not be enough unless Australia builds nuclear power plants. However, if the "hot rock" geothermal technology lives up to its promise, it might be possible to power the country and still remain nuclear-free.

"I'm not suggesting this is a single answer, because there is no single answer." Australia would still have to harness heat from the sun and store it; it would still need to store carbon from coal plants deep beneath the earth; it would still need to use more gas than coal, use energy from wind, ensure deforestation no longer occurred, plant billions of trees and ensure cars and buildings were much more energy efficient. "We need transformational stuff to solve this problem," he says.

After two years as environment minister, Campbell's heart appears to be in the right place. The same could be said of his predecessors, Robert Hill and David Kemp. Hill wore the opprobrium of refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol and went on to become defence minister, fighting a still un-won war against terrorism before taking a diplomatic posting to New York. Kemp left politics broken.

With an Australian voting public growing more restive about global warming and most climate scientists convinced the world is hurtling towards disaster, Campbell appears to be a lonely figure as he stands beneath the only shade anywhere around Innamincka - old gums along Cooper's Creek. Strong hearts and good intentions couldn't save Burke and Wills from the Australian heat. Not out here.