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Good evening and welcome to this ground-breaking meeting of the Asia Pacific Partnership Joint Task Force.
On behalf of the Australian Government I extend a warm welcome to all our international guests.
And a special welcome to the delegation representing Canada, a friend, a strategic supplier of energy resources to the world, and a new member of the Asia Pacific Partnership.
The Kyoto Protocol and the Asia Pacific Partnership are complementary strategies.
One based around binding targets and the other the development and adoption of the new environmentally friendly technologies and clean energy sources to help us reach those targets.
As APP members, we understand how important this is to finding climate change solutions.
Without cleaner solutions for our current energy sources, we cannot continue to grow.
And despite the growth in renewables and nuclear power in the region, the reality is we will be reliant on coal, gas and other fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.
In Australia, for example, around 80 per cent of electric power generation is sourced from coal.
Although Japan is one of the larger users of nuclear power, its electricity sector continues to rely heavily on coal and natural gas.
Korea faces similar challenges to Japan.
China's growth would not be possible without reliable energy from coal-fired power stations.
The US is second only to China in the production and use of coal.
India's growth will continue to rely on fossil fuels and its use of coal is expected to approach if not exceed that of the US over the next decade.
And despite its wealth of hydro and nuclear power, Canada is currently considering options for carbon capture and storage for new coal power stations to reduce its carbon footprint.
Therefore, clean coal and cleaner fossil fuel technology has to be a major part of our policy response to climate change.
Which is why we are here.
We all share a common goal.
By any measure, the seven countries in the Asia Pacific Partnership represent a regional partnership of great significance and even greater opportunity.
Together, we represent around half the world’s emissions, energy use, GDP and population.
There are vast differences in the wealth and economic circumstances of our people with enormous economic growth – and the advancement of human wellbeing – now occurring in the developing economies of China and India.
This growth is coupled with an insatiable thirst for energy.
It is here that the Asia-Pacific Partnership really comes into its own, offering all of us opportunities for our own economic growth.
But also an opportunity – and an obligation – to be part of the solution to the environmental consequences of what is happening in our region – one of the most rapid expansions of economic activity that has occurred in world history.
It is the thinking behind Australia's approach to clean coal technology.
It is worth considering that Australia’s coal resources alone, assuming the advent of successful clean coal technologies, are so large that they could be significant in the global energy mix for several hundred years.
Therefore, as Minister for Resources and Energy I am driving the Australian Government's $500 million National Clean Coal Initiative.
This very important investment will build on the billion dollar COAL21 fund that Australian coal producers have committed to clean coal technology.
Our funding includes:
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$75 million for a National Clean Coal Research program;
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$50 million for a national carbon mapping and infrastructure plan;
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$50 million for a coal gasification research facility in Queensland; and
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$100 million for two post-combustion capture PCC demonstration plants in New South Wales and Victoria.
The remaining funding will be used to support the demonstration of priority clean coal technologies, including coal-to-liquids projects that involve carbon capture and storage.
Coal-to-liquids and gas-to-liquids technologies – if we can reduce their carbon footprint – offer us the same opportunity to deliver clean diesel for transport fuel as other clean coal and gas technologies offer to clean up power generation.
That is why we hope to deliver, later this year, world first legislation for a carbon capture and storage framework and why we have committed funding to support the mapping of carbon storage sites.
Those of you with an interest in carbon storage will be particularly interested in the Otway project and I am sure that, like me, you are looking forward to tomorrow’s site visit.
Otway is one of the world's leading projects for trialling and monitoring geological storage of carbon dioxide.
Your presence at the official opening of the project underscores the spirit of cooperation and information sharing that makes the Asia-Pacific Partnership so important.
We are also embarking on some other exciting demonstration projects of key technologies.
The retrofitting of oxyfuel combustion technology to the Callide A coal power station in Queensland is a world first.
I am proud that this project is being undertaken in partnership with Japanese industry and that it was declared a Flagship Project at the Asia Pacific Partnership Ministerial Meeting in India last year.
Funding from the National Clean Coal Initiative will allow us to expand this demonstration program to include retrofitting post-combustion capture technology to two other power stations in Australia.
One will be based on black coal in New South Wales and the other will be based on brown coal here in the State of Victoria.
These projects – like those you are undertaking in your countries – are each important in their own way but take on greater importance when the benefits are shared.
I expect that Australia’s National Clean Coal Initiative will both support and benefit from the Asia Pacific Partnership.
Our Partnership is so important – to bring forward for the world the commercial availability of low emission technologies for power generation, and hopefully, in the future, cleaner transport fuels.
Your presence here at the first ever Joint Taskforce meeting and seminar is a clear demonstration of the commitment of our member countries to the Asia Pacific Partnership and clean technology cooperation.
But of course, Governments can’t make this work on their own.
A major strength of the Asia Pacific Partnership is that it is not just a Partnership between countries.
It is also a Partnership with industry.
Without industry we can make no progress.
Your involvement and support for the Asia Pacific Partnership will be the key to our success in achieving our economic and clean development objectives for the future.
The world faces an enormous challenge with historic economic growth accompanied by an insatiable thirst for energy at the same time as concern about climate change is deepening.
Together, we have to find the solutions to the environmental consequences of growth in our region.