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Green schemes 'back on the menu'
MICHELLE RIDLEY, The West Australian October 8, 2010, 6:42 am



WA business leaders have begun to dust off their carbon abatement plans in the wake of the alliance that returned the Gillard Government to power.

Climate change consultant and Greensense founder Pete Tickler said clients who had parked their emission reduction plans when the carbon pollution reduction scheme was defeated had started to revisit their ideas.

"Carbon now appears to be back on the menu," he said.

"Some of our clients have pulled that file out of the filing cabinet and are starting to have another look at it."

Mr Tickler said despite the increased activity from his clients, who include local government, utilities and mining and energy companies, many had lost board support for big-scale investment.

"You haven't seen any large announcements from large emitters investing heavily in carbon abatement projects," he said.

"Where guys will perhaps be making some investments is toe in the water stuff, so they're running pilots and running smaller scale projects that potentially they can ramp up."

With widespread business uncertainty about a price on carbon, the one area everyone seems to have investigated is energy use.

BHP Billiton, Wesfarmers, Alcoa, Apache Energy, Rio Tinto and Minara Resources are just a handful of the Australian businesses which have signed up to identify and implement energy savings with the Federal Government's Energy Efficiency Opportunities program.

"They (energy efficiency projects) have been going ahead because they're zero cost or even negative cost," Mr Tickler said. "You actually make money on them."

Some companies have taken small steps toward direct options, such as Verve Energy, which has invested $58 million in the Greenough River solar farm in the Mid-West and $40 million in the Grasmere wind farm at Albany.

Others have used forestry companies to offset emissions by planting trees. For example, Woodside has a $100 million contract with CO2 Australia to offset the emissions from its Pluto LNG project.

Wesfarmers Insurance this week announced a much smaller deal with Carbon Conscious and Skywest offers passengers an option to pay to offset the emissions from their flight through Carbon Neutral.

CO2 Australia chief executive Andrew Grant said while most companies had decided to hold off on big projects until there was more certainty about a carbon price, others had chosen to act early.

"We have some companies that have committed to a project in anticipation of an obligation under a national scheme," he said.

"There's a lot of value in capacity building and learning by doing and being comfortable, particularly given the scale of the commitment they're going to have to make when a carbon price comes in. They don't want to have to do it all from scratch."

Nowhere have the fluctuations in policy been better reflected than in CO2 Group's share price, which fell from a high of 41? in October 2009, to a low of 11? in June. It closed at 22.5? yesterday.

Mr Tickler said that if nothing else, many companies had put together multi-disciplinary teams with experts in sustainability, law and business risk to deal with a potential carbon price.
"Organisations have started to adjust their internal structures to allow people to manage carbon," he said. "That in itself is significant."