A new partly gas-industry funded CSIRO report says carbon produced from Beetaloo basin fracking could potentially be offset by carbon capture and storage based out of Darwin, but about a third of the potential total would have to be offset overseas which cannot yet be done, while the former boss of the Clean Energy Regulator’s offsets integrity committee said the amount of emissions that can be abated has been grossly inflated.

The extremely detailed and complex report was written by the CSIRO’s Gas Industry Social and Environment Alliance researchers. The Alliance receives a third of its funding from the gas industry and the rest from government.

It modelled greenhouse gas emissions from four different production scenarios, ranging from 365 to 1130 petajoules/year, producing from 6.6 million tonnes to 33 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, which it said compared to Australia’s actual GHG emissions in the 12 months to March 2022 of 487.1 million tonnes.

However, the report did not make the assumption that between 50 and 75 per cent of the Beetaloo gas would be exported, with overseas emissions not included in the report’s calculations.

It recommended the following offset options: Indigenous fire management; human induced regeneration of land and coastal habitats, re-forestation or carbon plantings in Australia; carbon farming and sequestration in soil; reducing land clearing and deforestation; accelerated weathering/mineral carbonation/reactive minerology; forest carbon management (extending timber rotations, optimising tree stocking levels, breeding selectively for faster-growing tree stocks, enhancing growth; geological carbon capture and storage).

“As for GHG emissions, the mitigation and offset options considered are also scenarios constrained by current knowledge of available technologies and their maturity, scale, longevity, governance and indicative costs,” it stated in the conclusion.

The report did not look at a cost-benefit or other economic analysis, the cost of carbon capture and other methods.

Currently more than seven million tonnes of mitigation and offsets could be achieved the Northern Territory, the report said, including mitigation activities during production, potential carbon capture and storage based out of Darwin, savannah fire management and other land-based offsets. It remarked on the potential for gas to be used in petrochemical and hydrogen production in Darwin.

Carbon capture is a fraught subject with the fossil fuel industry stating it is effective in reducing a proportion of the emissions from some polluting industries but there are a lot of failed projects across the world and plants that fail to meet their targets for greenhouse gas capture.

It states the total global carbon capture in 2021 was almost 40 million tonnes.

A further 7.9 to 15.6 million tonnes per year could be offset in the rest of Australia for the Beetaloo gas development, with the CSIRO assuming that only 10 per cent of Australia’s total credits would be available for the entire Beetaloo shale gas project.

But at the highest level of production the rest of the offsets, about 11 million tonnes, would have to be done outside of Australia.

In August last year, the NT Government produced its Greenhouse Gas Emissions Offsets Policy which would allow carbon emitters to use federal government-approved international offsets.

However the ABC reported that in October federal Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen addressed the Australian Financial Review Energy and Climate Summit and said that would be years away.

“Even strong advocates of the use of international credits recognise that we are several years off being able to assert that these requirements can be met,” he said.

Tamboran looks to be the first company developing gas in the Beetaloo and chief executive Joel Riddle told the media in September last year the company hoped to begin pumping in 2025.

Problems with offsets in CSIRO report: ‘Grossly inflated’

The former head of the Clean Energy Regulator’s offsets integrity committee, Professor Andrew MacIntosh told the ABC in this instance the CSIRO had got it wrong, saying the level of pollution from Beetaloo basin extraction the report said could be offset was “demonstrable nonsense”.

“I think it highlights all the problems with offsets, that this sort of work is being used to allow and facilitate a gas development,” he told the ABC.

“They’ve come forward with estimates [for the amount of emissions that can be offset] that are grossly inflated.

“What people like me would like to see — because I am not an opponent of the gas industry and I am not an opponent of offsets — what I would like to see is offsets undertaken that are legitimate.

“That is, they are generating real and additional abatement. A good example is the abatement estimates provided for human-induced regeneration, which are based on the assumption that almost 50 million hectares of Australia’s uncleared rangelands have somehow lost at least 95 per cent of their natural tree and shrub cover.

“This is nonsense.”

Environment Centre NT director Kirsty Howey said it would cost up to $1 billion a year to offset 33 million tonnes of carbon with carbon credits currently valued at $30 a tonne.

However, an NAB report stated the CSIRO’s Stocktake and analysis of sequestration technologies report for the Climate Change Authority predicted the cost of abatement could move towards A$100/tonne required to underpin investment in carbon capture and storage projects once abatement of more than 160 to 170 million tonnes is required.

The report said the bank estimated 110 to 120 million tonnes of abatement has been delivered already by the current ACCU market.

“This long-awaited GISERA report – partly funded by the very industry which stands to benefit if fracking goes ahead – is not worth the paper it’s written on,” Dr Howey said.

“The scale of emissions from fracking the Beetaloo basin is immense. To offset these emissions using Australian carbon credit units would cost over $1 billion every year – that makes fracking unviable on any measure.

“The report claims that unproven technology such as carbon capture and storage can be used to mitigate emissions from the Beetaloo basin. This technology has never worked at scale, has a track record of failure, and is being used by the gas industry to justify opening up new gas fields like the Beetaloo.

“The report also confirms that there are insufficient offsets available in Australia to offset Beetaloo emissions, suggesting that the gas industry will need to utilise dodgy international offsets to meet recommendation 9.8.

“International offsets have been repeatedly proven to lack integrity and may actually increase emissions. Is it any wonder that the gas industry has been lobbying for years to be able to use them,” she said.

The ABC published a statement from the CSIRO which said the “report was subject to CSIRO’s standard peer review process, which involves impartial and independent assessment of research by others working in the same or a related field”.

“The GISERA Alliance Agreement between CSIRO, government and industry partners provides a transparent governance framework to provide high-quality, independent scientific research and information to communities living in gas development regions.,” the spokesperson said in a statement to the ABC.

The Beetaloo Sub-basin lies south-east of Katherine and spans about 30,000 sq km, with an estimated gas resource similar to other major gas producing basins in Australia, such as the Surat Basin in Queensland and the Bonaparte/Browse Basins in Western Australia.

The report said part of the context of the study was recommendation 9.8 of the 2018 Scientific Inquiry into Hydraulic Fracturing in the Northern Territory, that the NT and Australian governments seek to ensure that there is no net increase in the life-cycle GHG emissions emitted in Australia from any onshore shale gas produced in the NT.

It warned the mix of mitigation or offset options for each scenario would depend on the scale, availability of the offset over the lifetime of the gas development, technical feasibility, indicative cost, and preference for local, well-governed offset schemes.

It assumed gas would be processed before being transported by pipeline to Darwin, with various combinations of end uses for the gas, such as domestic use, LNG export, local refinery, and production of chemicals and hydrogen. It said total lifetime emissions to be abated across 25 years would range from 164 million tonnes to 826 million tonnes, based on the production scenarios.