G20: Time to refocus on energy

Will Howard, Sara Bice and Mike Sandiford

Over the next two days, G20 leaders will be attempting to ‘strengthen energy markets’ as one of the Summit’s agenda priorities.

The G20’s official website states that global energy demand is expected to increase by over one-third by 2035. Developing new energy markets is a key part of the effort to achieve the economic growth on which Australia’s G20 presidency is focused.

World leaders will be making decisions about the resources beneath our feet, decisions that will have impacts for generations. And the frightening thing is we don’t know what these impacts will be.

Increasingly, sedimentary basins which underlie more than half of Australia’s landmass are being explored for new resources and services, such as coal-seam and shale gas, sub-surface storage of CO2 and geothermal energy. Australia’s Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane says New South Wales will face gas shortages unless other supplies are developed, mainly through extraction of coal-seam gas.

Coal seam gas extraction. Source: NSW Government. 

Sedimentary basins contain fossil fuel resources that provide for more than 90% of Australia’s primary energy production. But they also hold the great majority of our groundwater, sustain most of our agricultural production and rural population centres and support a large part of Australia’s endangered riverine and rangeland ecosystems.

The search for new resources like unconventional gas marks a new stage in the contest for the subsurface.Protesters concerned about impacts on water resources and agricultural productivity seek to block development.

We face the challenge in striking an appropriate balance between the need for new energy resources and protecting the economic, ecological and social functions supported by the basins and their surface environments. We need to know more about the risks of developing resources in sedimentary basins.

Australian Chief Scientist Ian Chubb responded to a report on unconventional gas delivered to the Prime Minister’s Science Engineering and Innovation Council, saying we need to support research into “the geological and geophysical aspects of prospective sedimentary basins,” and “the surface and groundwater dynamics of prospective sedimentary basins.”

In other words, we need to build a better understanding of how Australia’s sedimentary basins work and how new technologies and extractive processes may affect precious water resources. And we need to do this now.

This urgent need for a beefed-up science and monitoring capacity should drive a new research agenda, providing trusted, credible information and analysis of sedimentary basins as well as the opportunities and risks posed by new uses of their resources. This agenda needs to be shared and supported by industries, governments, communities, and the research sector.

We will need geoscience for comprehensive and independent monitoring of subsurface (e.g. groundwater systems) and surface (e.g. “fugitive” emissions of methane) processes, and provide baseline data against which future impacts can be detected and managed.

Legal and regulatory expertise is needed to develop management regimes that cross resource usages and jurisdictions. Economic expertise is needed to assess the costs and benefits of multiple uses of the pore space. Perhaps most importantly we need to apply social sciences to ensure that community aspirations are met and that a “social license” is fully integrated into basin management decisions.

It is critical that Australians become aware of this contest beneath our feet.

This article originally appeared on G20 Watch, your independent coverage of G20 Australia. Supported by: Melbourne School of Government and CPA Australia. 

Associate Professor Will Howard  of School of Earth Sciences, The University of Melbourne.

Professor Mike Sandiford, Director, Melbourne Energy Institute, The University of Melbourne.