Group leader Professor Victor Rudolph said the cost savings were possible by including the carbon capture and storage (CCS, or carbon geosequestration) into coal seam methane operations, with the CO2 replacing the methane extracted from the seam.

“Geosequestration of CO2 into deep coal seams can reduce the net cost of capture and storage in Queensland by some 46%,” Professor Rudolph said.

“The process reduces the costs down to $25/tonne of CO2 avoided, when applied to a large-scale 1400MW coal-fired power plant.”

The cost-reduction technology has been part of a research project nearing completion and supported by an ARC-Linkage grant and six Australian and international organisations.

The group is now proposing a joint project with Germany's leading research organisation into CO2 adsorption in coal, the RWTH Aachen University of North Rhine-Westfalia, according to principal researcher Dr Paul Massarotto.

“The aim is to investigate further technology improvements by injection of the whole flue gas stream, composed of some 13 percent CO2 and 87 percent nitrogen, into deep coal seams in Queensland and North Germany and abandoned underground coal mines of North Rhine-Westfalia,” Massarotto said.

“In Queensland, both the Surat Basin-Walloons and the Bowen Basin-Rangal and Bandana coal measures will be investigated for this potentially optimum geosequestration path, as it can do away with the capture costs which are some 75 percent to 80 percent of a total project, partly replaced by higher compression costs.”

Massarotto said Queensland’s coal seam gas industry has already defined vast resources with the current potential to sequester over 3.7 Giga tonnes of CO2.

“This sequestration capacity is equivalent to over 56 years of CO2 emissions from Queensland's current and future planned coal-fired power plants to 2020,” he said.