Australia expands renewable funding to hydrogen, CCS

The Australian government has widened the scope of renewable funding from one of its main financing bodies to allow proponents of carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects, largely from the fossil fuel sector, and hydrogen projects to receive state funding.

The mandate of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (Arena) has been expanded to finance hydrogen projects, energy storage, low carbon materials, including aluminium and steel, CCS and new measurement technologies for healthier soils, Australian energy minister Angus Taylor said.

Arena is an energy financing arm of the Australian government and was originally set up to oversee government funding for renewable energy sources. Canberra previously provided Arena with A$1.4bn ($1.03bn) of funding to support these new and emerging technologies and an additional A$192.5mn for a series of targeted programmes, Taylor said.

The potential funding for CCS follows a recent announcement by Chevron that it is in talks with the Western Australia (WA) state regulator about a shortfall in the volume of carbon dioxide equivalent injected into a CCS facility at its 15.6mn t/yr Gorgon LNG venture on Barrow Island offshore WA. The Gorgon CCS plant is the largest of its kind in Australia.

The Australian government has also released plans to issue Australian domestic carbon credits to operators of CCS projects.

The expansion of the Arena funding was one of the recommendations from a review of the government's policies to lower greenhouse gas emissions that was released last year and headed by Grant King, the former chief executive of Australian utility and gas group Origin Energy.

Canberra has been busy this year with various funding for the energy sector, providing fuel security services payments of A$2.05bn to the country's refining industry to keep refineries open. It has also provided various funding programmes to aid gas exploration at the Beetaloo basin in the Northern Territory.

By Kevin Morrison