The Albanese government has revealed it wants to cut greenhouse gas emissions by between 62% and 70% by 2035, based on 2005 levels.
The target was much anticipated, but the government also revealed a suite of major reports that outline how the country could get to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
So how does the government think Australia can do it? Here are some key takeaways.
Carbon removals will do a lot of heavy lifting
The government’s plan suggests that carbon removal technologies will play a major role in getting to net zero.
The plan lays out the results of Treasury modelling that looked at “an efficient domestic pathway consistent with existing policies and the expected availability of abatement technology” in a world where economies achieve emissions reductions high enough to keep global heating below 2C.
That modelling shows that after emissions reductions have been rolled out across the economy, there is still 167m tonnes of CO2 that needs to be removed annually by 2050.
Eighty million tonnes will already have been removed by 2035, the modelling says, which is only slightly more than the 73m tonnes that is now being removed by changes in land use and forestry, according to Australia’s national greenhouse gas accounts.
So this then leaves 87m tonnes that needs to be removed from the atmosphere – and the government admits it is not clear how this will happen.
“New carbon removal technologies will be increasingly important as 2050 approaches, but most need further development before they will be ready to be deployed at scale,” the plan says.
Some of the new technologies the government points to include tree planting, forms of carbon capture and storage – a technology that has promised a lot but delivered little in recent decades – and direct air capture, which is still in its infancy.
Direct air capture includes a suite of technologies being trialled that pull CO2 from the atmosphere and then store it.
The CSIRO will deliver a “Carbon Dioxide Removal Roadmap”, the plan says.
There’s an acrostic to help us understand what needs to happen
The government released its 2035 target, along with a report on its net zero plan, a report into the Treasury’s modelling, and six sectoral plans.
We were also given a report from the Climate Change Authority (CCA) into the advice it had given the government on the target. That’s a lot of material.
But the government has identified five themes it needs to work on if it is to reach net zero by 2050 and, by accident or design (but probably design), they fit neatly into an acrostic:
Clean electricity across the economy.
Lowering emissions by electrification and efficiency.
Expanding clean fuel use.
Accelerating new technologies.
Net carbon removals scaled up.
Renewables will almost saturate electricity generation by 2050
Right now, emissions from generating electricity are one-third of Australia’s entire carbon footprint, so getting these down is key.
According to the Treasury modelling, by 2050 emissions from the electricity sector will have dropped from 140m tonnes in 2025 to just 9m tonnes.
By then, 97% of the electricity in the National Electricity Market (everywhere except Western Australia and Northern Territory) will be generated by renewables.
But renewables will also play an outsized role in decarbonising other sectors, as fossil fuel use gets replaced by electrification (think electric cars being charged with clean electricity).
Electric vehicles dominate emissions cuts in transport, but we will also need new fuels
The transport sector is the third-largest in terms of emissions, but transport emissions have been consistently creeping up ever since emissions have been measured.
According to advice from the CCA, half of the light vehicles sold between now and 2035 will need to be electric vehicles.
From 2035 to 2050, the biggest absolute cuts in emissions across all sectors will come from transport, according to the net zero plan, falling by more than half between 2035 and 2050.
“Transition of the passenger vehicle fleet from [internal combustion engine] vehicles to EVs accounts for most of this change,” the government says.
But there will also need to be “drop-in” low carbon fuels for vehicles that are not electrified, and on Thursday the government said it was committing $1.1bn to produce these in Australia.
Potential feedstocks for these fuels, the government said, included “canola seeds, tallow, sugarcane, municipal solid waste, bagasse, agricultural residues, short rotation trees, hydrogen and captured CO2”.
The safeguard mechanism will drive emissions reductions in the mining sector.
Australia is a major resources exporter and one of the world’s biggest exporters of coal and gas.
The resources sector is also responsible for 22% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, not counting the coal and gas that is burned overseas (those emissions go on the greenhouse gas accounts of the countries that burn them).
The key policy to drive emissions reductions in this sector is the safeguard mechanism – a scheme where major emitting projects are required to lower their emissions annually, or have to buy carbon credits if they fail to meet their targets.
So what happens to these industries that burn a lot of fossil fuels in their operations and to refine their products?
Some of those products – such as nickel, iron ore, cobalt, lithium and copper – will be needed to manufacture the technologies for a zero carbon world, such as electric car motors and batteries, or wind turbine blades and solar panels.
Electrifying haulage, reducing methane leaks, and using alternative fuels are all options to decarbonise the sector, the report says.
But the plan for the sector says there will still be residual greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
According to the Treasury modelling, in 2050 the sector will still be emitting 19m tonnes of CO2.
