Australia Emissions 101: It’s the exports.
Note: Unfortunately some of the interactive charts in this piece don’t display very well when they are viewed on small devices (e.g. phones). You should be able to follow what is going on, but the charts will be a lot more clear on a tablet or a big screen. I’ll have a play when I get a second to see if I can make them work better, but that will take me at least a few days.
Understanding a country’s climate performance is really bloody complicated. The metrics shift, jargon is everywhere, and governments of all persuasions are constantly trying to spin mediocre efforts into electoral gold. Unfortunately, sometimes people just outright lie.
This piece is the first part of a series that is designed to give you the 101 on what is important about Australia’s climate performance with as little jargon as possible and no bullshit. In it, I’m going to step through the most important elements of our emissions profile.
My goal here is simple. I want to equip you with the basic skills that you need to call bullshit the next time someone tries to pull the wool over your eyes. If you’re interested in that: Welcome!
It is absolutely, definitely the exports
For several decades, Australia’s largest contribution to climate change by far has been through the production and sale of fossil fuels to other countries.
In 2024, Australia was the world’s largest exporter of metallurgical coal. Metallurgical coal is the type of coal used in the process of turning iron ore into steel. This form of coal is fairly close to being pure carbon. Among other things, it is used as a chemical additive to strip the oxygen from iron oxide and leave pure iron. Of all the metallurgical coal transferred between countries around the world in that year, nearly half (precisely 45.9%) of it came out of a hole in Australia. Almost of this was from Queensland, though a bit came from New South Wales as well.
At the same time, Australia also exported farcically-large quantities of thermal coal, which is the type of coal used to run power stations. Indonesia is also heavy-hitter here, and significantly outpaces Australia in the trade of this kind of coal, but we are a very, very comfortable second, and are responsible for 18.7% of all the world’s international trade in thermal coal.
(For the purpose of this, we can act as if thermal coal and metallurgical coal are completely separate things. They aren’t, and the boundary between the two can be blurry. This is something that coal miners often use to mislead both the public and sometimes even our regulators.)
Again in that same year, Australia was also the second largest exporter of liquefied gas — being just behind the United States and very, very slightly ahead of Qatar (link) — and responsible for 19.1% of all the world’s liquefied gas trade.
It is worth noting that significant quantities of gas are transferred between countries through pipes without having to be liquefied for sea transport. If the trade in piped gas and liquefied gas are placed on like terms, Australia falls several places from second. However, for those regions reliant on LNG — like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and even some regions in the south of China — these fuels are often not substitutable for practical reasons. For example, you can’t pipe gas into a place that doesn’t have enough pipes.
After a decade of having all of Australia’s cheapest and most accessible gas bled dry by east coast gas export terminals, this is partly why Australia is in the absurd position of having to consider building a gas import terminal even though it is one of the world’s largest gas exporters.
All this means that while Australia imports some fossil fuels — particularly oil — and is heavily-reliant on fossil fuels for its own energy production, it produces and exports much, much more. You can see the flow of energy into and out of Australia in the Sankey chart below.
Australia’s status as a major fossil fuel exporter is a relatively recent phenomenon, with Australia’s fossil fuel expansion having grown at an extraordinary pace in just the past few decades. This exceptional growth and its relative emissions impact is shown in the animated chart below.
Today, any person who tries to discuss Australia’s climate performance without starting with the country’s fossil fuel exports is missing the most significant part of the problem.
The Australian government loves to pretend that it has no responsibility for the emissions resulting from its exported fossil fuels. They tried to spin this load of crap (and more!) into a silk vest the other day when they approved the forty year extension to Woodside’s North West Shelf gas export terminal. Rolled gold horseshit.
Yes, it is true that formal international legal arrangements require countries to account for those fossil fuels that are burned in their borders. However, those same international agreements are not — and have never been — exhaustive. Not one single word of the UNFCCC, the Paris Agreement, and the whole spectrum of COP decisions prohibits you from observing that a country that permits the extraction and sale of fossil fuels during a climate crisis is jointly responsible for the ensuing emissions.
International climate law is awful, but the Paris Agreement doesn’t stop you from using your fucking brain. Anyone who suggests that it might is having a lend.
Lately, emissions from Australia’s gas exports are receiving a significant amount of attention. Probably more than the emissions from the production of coal.
On the one hand, this makes sense because the gas industry is the fastest growing source, and the fossil fuel industry as a whole is very much using debates about the role of gas as cover for dirtier fuels. It suits everyone working in the Australian fossil fuel industry for the focus to always be on gas.
The emissions impact of Australia’s coal sector vastly outstrips the emissions impact of its gas sector no matter how you slice it. As you can see below, in 2023–24 more than three-quarters of the emissions burden of Australia’s fossil fuels came from the coal sector. If we extend our view to the past several decades, nearly nine-tenths of that burden comes from coal.
This difference isn’t because gas is meaningfully any cleaner than coal.
The simple reason that the emissions impact of Australia’s coal is so much larger than the emissions impact of our gas exports is because we export so much more coal than gas.
Recently, the emissions impact of burning the coal Australia exports each year has been a bit more than four times the size of the emissions impact of burning the gas it exports. There is some nuance to this — I wouldn’t want to be accused of bullshitting you in a series of posts that is decidedly anti-bullshit — but the main reason for this difference is because Australia exported about four times more coal than gas.
As shown in the animated chart above, the emissions impact of our exports is dramatically larger than emissions created in Australia. Here is the same information in a static chart.
Until this picture starts to look different, the priority always needs to be the impact of Australia’s exported fossil fuels.
The emissions impact of these exports at home
Digging up and shipping fossil fuels overseas is messy business. Separate to the climate burden that Australia’s fossil fuels create when burned overseas, a catastrophic volume of emissions are created through the process of extracting, purifying, processing and transporting these exports overseas.
I’m going to run through a few examples to help you understand where these emissions come from.
Methane from coal mines
When coal lies undisturbed underground, molecules of methane are bound to the surface of the coal under the pressure of everything that is sitting on top of the seam. Methane is both a powerful greenhouse gas and the main component of the fossil fuel conventionally known as “gas”. The process of mining coal releases the pressure that had been holding the methane in place, and grant it pathways to escape to the atmosphere.
For some coal mines — particularly underground coal mines—this is by far the largest source of emissions for the mine. Underground coal mines regularly report that as much as nine-tenths or more of the emissions from operating their mines are from methane leeching out of the coal seam. There are very good reasons to suspect widespread under-reporting of methane emissions from Australian coal mines.
Gas facilities have a similar methane problem, though in their case methane is their primary product. Methane emissions from the gas industry occur through leaks, blowouts and other intentional and unintentional releases of the fuel.
Like coal mines, the reported proportion of methane emissions as a share of the total varies significantly for gas producers, from 30–40% for some onshore unconventional gas operations down to just 2–5% for other offshore operations. Most gas producers report that the proportion of their total emissions that come from methane is less than 10%.
Again, there is reason to doubt how accurate these company-reported figures are. What is true is that other sources of emissions are likely more important at sites producing gas than they are at sites producing coal, even though they are important at both.
Because coal production is more methane-intensive than production of oil and gas, and because Australia produces far more coal than oil and gas, Australia’s officially reported coal mine methane emissions are much higher than its methane emissions from gas.
Reservoir carbon dioxide from gas fields
As I stepped through in my long read about the continued failure at Chevron’s Gorgon carbon capture and storage facility, oil and gas fields contain significant volumes of carbon dioxide mixed in with the fossil fuels. As these fuels are extracted from the ground this carbon dioxide must be separated out to avoid damage to the infrastructure. In almost all cases, this carbon dioxide is dumped directly into the atmosphere, with no attempt to limit its impact on the climate.
The quantity of carbon dioxide varies greatly, depending on the reservoir. Woodside claims that the target reservoir of its Scarborough gas project contains less than 0.1% carbon dioxide. Santos’s Barossa gas field is a menacing 18–20% carbon dioxide.
I don’t have emissions data for all of Australia’s liquefied gas terminals at the right resolution to split out reservoir carbon dioxide from other sources, but I do have them for Gorgon, and can use that as an imperfect example. The Gorgon facility is hitting a gas field that is 14% carbon dioxide, so it produces substantially more reservoir carbon dioxide. Since it started operating, about 45% of the emissions produced at the facility have been carbon dioxide pulled from the reservoir. This is higher than most, and other terminals in operation today are somewhere between that and near-zero.
A small amount of Gorgon’s reservoir carbon dioxide emissions — about 15% of the total emissions from the site—have been sequestered into its sputtering failure of a carbon capture facility. If you want to read more about it, you can do that here.
These two sources of emissions — methane emissions from the operation of coal and gas extraction facilities and emissions of reservoir carbon dioxide found in oil and gas fields — make up most of the sector known as ‘fugitive emissions’.
That name is a bit of a furphy. The word ‘fugitive’ implies that these emissions are from leaks or other sources that are difficult to track down. In reality, most of the emissions from this sector occur from vast, sustained and intentional releases of methane and carbon dioxide to the atmosphere with little or no effort to mitigate the impact of this climate pollution.
Fossil fuel use to produce fossil fuels
Coal and gas production burn enormous quantities of fossil fuels in order to extract, purify, process, and transport fossil fuels. Each fuel, and method of extraction is different in this regard.
Open cut coal mines burn through colossal amounts of diesel fuel shifting the overburden — the rock that sits above the coal seam — from one place to another. Set ups vary, but some coal mines work essentially as a rolling pit. An armada of mining trucks spend years carrying rock from one wall of the mine to the other — inching the pit across the landscape — as production on the mine floor chases the coal seam.
Underground coal mines obviously don’t need to move their overburden from place to place, but these operations will still be burning large amounts of diesel. The air in an underground mine needs to be regularly changed to clean of particulate matter from the operation of machinery underground — itself often run on diesel — and keep methane levels low enough to avoid the risk of explosions. Massive ventilation systems are in place at each underground mine to regularly change out the air. These are often responsible for as much as 40% of a coal mine’s total energy use.
Liquefied gas terminals are less reliant on diesel, but have their own energy intensive processes. Before it is put on a ship, fossil gas needs to be cooled to more than 160 degrees Celsius below zero. At this point, the gas becomes a liquid and its volume reduces to around 1/600th of its size at normal temperatures. This means you can fit hundreds of times more gas per shipment, but cooling gas to this point requires truly epic amounts of energy.
As a rule of thumb, liquefied gas terminals burn around one tonne of gas for every seven tonnes of gas sent overseas. In recent years, Australia’s ten liquefied gas terminals have burned more gas than Australia’s entire manufacturing sector. They are — by some distance — Australia’s largest users of gas even before considering the gas that they are shipping overseas.
So significant is the amount of gas consumed at these terminals that the total emissions from the oil and gas sector’s fuel use is more than twice as large as emissions from fuel use at the country’s coal mines. Again: Australia’s coal mines produce about four times as much energy as its gas sector does.
What does that add up to?
When added together — along with the emissions from the generation of grid-supplied electricity — emissions from the production of fossil fuels in Australia amounted to 95.3 million tonnes of climate pollution, or a little over one-fifth of the national total.
This is decidedly an underestimate, there are some parts of the emissions impact that I have not considered at all in coming to these numbers. For example, coal is transported from mine to port on immense diesel fuelled rail lines. I have entirely ignored the impact of these emissions. Further, in every way possible I have done these calculations in a way that takes Australia’s emissions reporting scheme at its word.
There are good reasons to doubt the veracity of emissions reported under this scheme. Some of the reasons for healthy skepticism are evident in the data provided on this page. For example, since 1990 Australia’s fossil fuel exports have nearly quadrupled. It’s so weird how methane emissions from fossil fuel production have stayed completely flat over that time. Coal exports have tripled since 1990. Methane emissions from production of coal? Basically the same. I’ll get into that particular pearl in another piece.
In summary
By far the most important thing to understand about Australia’s climate performance is the impact of its exports, both at home and especially abroad.
The export of fossil fuels is by far the largest impact Australia has on the global climate. In recent times, Australia has done more than twice as much harm through the permitting and approval of major fossil fuel infrastructure than it has through the creation of greenhouse gases on its own shores.
While it is true that formal emissions accounting rules attribute the emissions created from the burning of fossil fuels to the places where these are burned, anyone who tries use this fact to entirely absolve Australia of any responsibility is either critically incompetent or critically dishonest. Most likely both.
Like the incompetent/dishonest example, more than one thing can be true at once. Australia shares responsibility for these emissions because without the endorsement of Australian governments these fossil fuels would never have been burned.
And if anyone tries to tell you that if we didn’t sell them, someone else would: kindly ask them to point to which country is politely sitting on its hands with a fossil fuel reserves capable of meeting 50% of the world’s trade in metallurgical coal, one-fifth of the world’s trade in thermal coal and one-fifth of the world’s liquefied gas. If Australia didn’t supply these fuels, there is no country on the planet that could replace it.
But far from being just an international concern, the production and export of coal and gas (with a tiny little bit of oil) also adds to Australia’s own emissions bottom line. Even before accounting for the fact that Australia is likely to be under-reporting emissions from coal and gas production, the fossil fuel production sector is responsible for a large, and growing share of the national total, throwing bad fossil fuels after worse.
Data sources
Rather than interrupt the flow of each section with references, I have chosen to list my data sources here.
To assess the scale of Australia’s fossil fuel exports, I relied on the March 2025 edition of the Office of the Chief Economist’s Resources and Energy Quarterly. I mostly used the data tables, but I supplemented this with some information that is only contained in the written report.
These data were converted to final emissions using the 2024 edition of Australia’s National Greenhouse Accounts Factors. The most recent edition came out while I was writing this piece, but I didn’t notice any meaningful changes, so I didn’t bother recalculating anything.
Domestic emissions figures come from a range of official government sources, including Australia’s Energy Statistics, the National Inventory, and Safeguard Mechanism data from the Clean Energy Regulator. In cases where I had to do conversions, I used official government emissions factors, and Australia’s preferred values for calculating the carbon dioxide equivalence of different gases.
This picture is just here for the thumbnail. You’re welcome!
