The world will keep burning coal for electricity and steel. Australia has cleaner coal, a proven mechanism to improve it further, and Paris, an international treaty built for exactly this purpose. Canberra has ignored all three, when cleaner exports could pay for our own transition.
Here is something almost never heard in Australia’s climate debate: there is a way to simultaneously grow Australian coal’s global market share and reduce global emissions. Not as a trade-off. As the same outcome.
The logic is direct. Global demand for coal – for electricity and for steel – will continue for years regardless of what Australia decides. The question is which country supplies it. Australian thermal and metallurgical coal is typically higher in energy value and lower in ash than competing supply from Indonesia, Mongolia and Russia.
When Australian coal displaces higher-ash alternatives in Japan, South Korea or India, two things happen at once: the coal that burns emits less CO₂ per megawatt hour or tonne of steel, and the higher-ash coal it displaced stays unburnt. One commercial transaction. Double the emissions saving. The industry has always understood the commercial incentive. The new argument is that it deserves to be understood as climate strategy – and credited as one.
The mechanism that makes it possible is coal preparation plant upgrades using proven equipment to reduce ash and raise calorific value. Every improvement in net calorific value delivered to market generates a calculable, proportional emissions reduction at the power station or coke oven. Scale that across Australia’s export volumes and the potential abatement reaches tens of millions of tonnes of CO₂ per year.
Rod Harle, a highly respected figure in Australian coal preparation, put the case for reduced Scope 3 emissions in the first technical session at the 20th International Coal Preparation Congress in October 2023. The room knew it was solid. Canberra wasn’t listening.
The scale matters. The Gorgon carbon capture project in Western Australia has absorbed over $60M in government support and delivers under 1.5 mtpa of CO₂ abatement. iPUT Technologies’ proposed $19M demonstration pilot for the low-ash approach could verify 50–90 mtpa – more than thirty times the abatement, at a fraction of the cost. With carbon credit revenue, it then funds itself, contributing to Australia’s own renewable transition costs without ongoing government subsidy. The comparison is not incidental. It is the entire policy argument.
The mechanism to support this already exists. It is Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.
Article 6 allows countries to cooperate on emissions reductions and share the credits. If Japan, South Korea or India sources lower-ash Australian coal and achieves measurably lower emissions per unit of output, both nations can count an agreed portion of that reduction toward their Paris commitments. The importing nation logs abatement progress and Australia’s share funds the upgrades, naturally incentivising increased trade.
When iPUT Technologies submitted a Carbon Credit Method Application to the Climate Change Authority in 2025, the response was unambiguous: Australia’s ACCU scheme only recognises reductions that occur within Australian borders. Savings achieved when Australian coal burns more efficiently overseas are, in the Government’s own words, “beyond the scope of the scheme”.
Consider that. Australia’s largest coal-related climate footprint occurs when exported coal burns overseas. The Paris Agreement explicitly enables cooperation to address exactly this. The Government’s response was to prioritise delayed tree clearing, wetland projects and savanna burning — all domestic, all convenient, none with published abatement targets on the same order of magnitude, and none delivering a cent to the coal communities whose royalties underwrite government renewables transition expenditure.
A Freedom of Information request lodged with the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water in March 2026 seeks the ministerial advice behind that decision, and any comparative emissions assessments of the methods prioritised ahead of this one. The results will be instructive.
The coal preparation sector has always known lower ash means better coal. The question now is whether the industry will make that case loudly enough – commercially and politically – that Canberra finally has to listen. The double win is sitting there. Every month Canberra delays, higher-ash coal burns in its place.
Dr Ian Boake and Vince Sunter
iPUT Technologies
