Australian miners see clean coal carbon answer

SYDNEY (Reuters) - The Australian government should scrap its proposed carbon trading scheme and concentrate on clean coal technology to cut greenhouse gas emissions, according to the country's mining sector.

Executive director of the Minerals Council of Australia, Mitchell Hooke, told Reuters on Wednesday that using technology to reduce emissions from coal-fired generators would have a far greater impact than a carbon trading scheme that is struggling to be approved by parliament.

"We've all gone past the debate about the science so the message is move on and understand that if there is not a clean coal solution, there will not be a global solution to climate change," Hooke said in an interview.

He said the Australian government was only paying lip-service to clean coal technology even though 85 percent of Australia's electricity generation was coal-fired compared with 48.6 percent in the United States.

Clean coal technology represents a range of processes being developed to reduce the environmental impact of coal-burning power stations and include coal gasification, carbon capture and storage and removing impurities before burning.

But most of the technologies are not yet proven on a commercial scale.

The coal sector as a supplier to the electricity industry is at the forefront of the mining sector's concerns about Australia's move to cut emissions, although other industries also face extra costs the council argues will make them less competitive.

The council says Australia' gold sector is facing a climate change cost of more than A$810 million ($697.1 million) over the next five years while competitors in the United States, Canada and developing nations face limited or no carbon costs.

CHEER-SQUAD ENTHUSIASTS

The government has not set a national target for a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. But it has said the reduction will be between 5 percent and 25 percent from 2000 levels by 2020, depending on the outcome of U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen in December.

Hooke said five percent meant 250 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions would need to be cut, equivalent to shutting down the entire electricity generation sector in Australia and eliminating all emissions from transport.

"That's what I mean about people not having an understanding of the sheer magnitude of the exercise -- there are so many cheer-squad enthusiasts running around telling us what to do but none of them are in the football field playing the game," he said.

Coal-fired generators produce electricity at less than half the cost of wind turbines and six times less than solar energy.

Hooke said the development of clean coal technology would have a greater global impact than a domestic cap-and-trade scheme because the technology could be applied worldwide.

Once developed, clean coal technology could be retrofitted to coal power stations in China and elsewhere.

China is trying to clean up emissions from its coal-fired power plants by scrapping aging units and building more efficient generators. It plans to have its first zero-emissions plant operating by 2015.

($1 = 1.162 Australian Dollar)

(Reporting by Bruce Hextall; Editing by David Fogarty)