BHP Billiton has backed “a price on carbon emissions”.

The mining heavyweight said carbon pricing combined with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology “can result in a range of generation technologies being implemented including wind, coal, solar, gas and hydro”, in its submission to the Finkel Review of Australia's energy system.

“The simplest way to do this is to put a price on carbon emissions for the electricity system,” it said.

The company wants taxpayer funding to be put into CCS, despite it being unproven at large scales and adding considerably to the costs of any new coal-fired power stations.

But the submission rejects the idea of also funding more wind, solar and other renewable energy sources through the Renewable Energy Target (RET).

“The RET's been a policy that's been in place for a long time now,” said Mike Henry, president of operations for BHP Billiton's subsidiary Minerals Australia.

“It's provided investment certainty, but one of the issues with the RET is that it doesn't incentivise a broad range of low emissions technology options. It only allows certain options.

“We come at this from the perspective of technology neutrality, which opens up the options for achieving that reduction in emissions.”

BHP wants “short-to-medium term” government payments to back new baseload power generation in South Australia.

The company said it had lost millions in the wake of a storm that knocked out power in South Australia last September.

“The 14-day outage, and the subsequent ramping up of operations, resulted in lost production of 15,000 tonnes,” the submission said.

BHP recently downsized its thermal coal investments, but Mr Henry says that was not because it is becoming redundant.

“Like the clarity that we've brought to our position on climate change, we've also been very clear on our position on thermal coal,” he said.

“That view is that the world's going to use thermal coal for a long time yet, as it will with other fossil fuels, and it's important to note here is that's not just our view.

“The world's body of pre-eminent climate change scientists, the IPCC [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], is also of the view that fossil fuels are going to be with us for a long period of time now, and it's one of the reasons why they advocate for CCS.”