Swaggie
SubscriberClive Palmer has applied to build a coal fired plant at his mine in Queensland.btw, no one wants to build a new coal fired power station in Australia again....offers were open....no takers
he gained approval from the local government but now the Qld government has stepped in and is "deliberating" and they have said "qld does not need anpother coal fieed station"
Why would they object if he is willing to use his own money?
This is planned to be a modern HELE station, and I know the engineer who designed it.
Regard sPhilipA
BTW this per capita emissions thing is a complete red herring. Australia has negative emissions of CO2 because of our large forest areas and relatively low population.
OldBushie
Sorry but that is total garbage.Originally Posted by gusthedog
If we stop selling them our coal, they will simply buy it somewhere else.
They pay MORE for our coal because it is the most efficient and ultimately, the CLEANEST coal on earth.
So yes lets stop selling our coal and make the worlds emissions worse.
That just does not make sense.
OldBushie
I have no issue with these EXPERIMENTS being carried out here in Australia, but why should my tax dollars go to subsidising these EXPERIMENTS especially as most of them require HUGE amounts of additional energy to supply the end users, thats you and me, with the same amount of energy a coal fired power station provides.
That mean we will most likely see at least a 50% increase in our power bills, just these gage-green lovers can feel good in themselves, but not real advantage for the country as a whole.
Wizard
SupporterI don’t think I’ll see the end of coal mining….maybe the next generation or two might.
While there is an abundance of coal available in Aus, sadly we cannot get the right type of coal for our operation which is create a maintenance headache burning what’s available.
OldBushie
Not quite true.
The Chinese wanted to build two new low emission coal fired power stations in the Hunter Vally.
The government stopped them because they were Chinese, not because they were coal fired.
Wait till we have a major weather event, where scores of people die because the gage-green power supplies failed, and I mean here in Australia, and see how quick they go back to building coal and gas fired power stations.
RoverLord
Not quite right. If Australia ceased coal exports, this would, as suggested raise the world coal price, and the cost of generating power from coal. Which would speed the replacement of coal fired plants by renewable/nuclear/gas plants because generating it from coal just got more expensive.
Greenhouse gas emissions per head is a furphy; the climate is only affected by totals, so until you multiply emissions per head by population, the figure is meaningless. And most especially, if it is not coupled with population growth numbers. Australia has high per capita emissions, and one of the world's highest population growths among developed economies.
But in another sense, Australia's lack of action on reducing emissions is not a furphy. It is highly probable that failure to act will result in what are effectively sanctions on our exports to high value markets in Europe - which, ironically, would increase Australia's reliance on fossil fuel exports.
The problem for governments in ceasing coal exports though, is not so much the effects on coal mining areas, but the loss of direct income especially to NSW and Qld governments of royalty from the coal mined, and personal and company tax and GST from the economic activity involved. Coal mining in Australia is big business and big tax, which governments are very reluctant to interfere with, quite apart from the overall economic issues which would arise from ceasing coal exports.
While not Australia's largest export, coal is still a significant export, and if this ceased, it would exert downward pressure on the $A, resulting in economywide price increases for our mostly imported consumer goods, offset in part by benefits for exporters. It is not at all clear to me what the overall economic balance would be, although long term it would probably be beneficial to the country, even if not in dollar terms. Which, of course, is small comfort to those who lost their career or whose shareholding and retirement plans just got dashed.
John
JDNSW
1986 110 County 3.9 diesel
1970 2a 109 2.25 petrol
ChatterBox
I understand the pressure on economies of not selling our coal. But we're quickly moving to a point that worldwide economies are going to crash because of human induced climate change. I'd rather this generation suffer slightly with higher prices than future generations exist on a planet that quickly becomes unlivable.
And we're the 12th largest emitter per capita according to wikapedia. That is important because why should India and china have to emit less per person than we do? Why should their economies suffer because of our privilige? Why can't they have air con like we do for example and the other things that consume massive amounts of power like us? The emergeling middle classes in India and china have to suffer but we don't because we were born here? That hardly seems fair.
Very Very Lucky!
air con on. Us Mexicans melt in 36Just kidding I run happily in 36 temps. The solar PV on my roof makes the AC at home and at work free. With the cool bits you sell I assumed your home might be smarter than mine.
Coal and gas are almost certainly going to be useful again when we have pyrolysis or other tech to use it with out stuffing up the environment. Honestly look at it a little like selling billions of cubic metres of our gas reserves for peanuts when keeping it would give us options to really make use of it for ourselves.
Not anti gas or coal. Not happy with stuffing our environment seems reasonable.
RoverLord
I'm afraid that you are missing a point. World economies do not operate on fairness. They operate on the quarterly bottom line.
Which is one of the major problems with the world. Since the 1970s, we have seen most of the world adopt Friedmann's view of how the economy works, which basically says that there is no value in long term outcomes, the only thing that matters is the quarterly bottom line. Which is, of course, nonsense. And governments, and indeed many businesses (not all businesses are run by bean counters) do not really follow this mantra, simply because long term outcomes do matter, and sooner or later the short term viewpoint will bite you (see Boeing for example).
John
JDNSW
1986 110 County 3.9 diesel
1970 2a 109 2.25 petrol
Swaggie
SubscriberI would expect that Ukraine would cut of the Russian gas if attacked as nordstream 1 goes through their territory. The EU would then have no option but to
keep the LIGNITE coal fired plants going and the Nuclear power stations.
The attached quote from the Australian of today 26 012022 has just been added but an interesting and not often thought of possibility.
The knock-on effect of Russia conflict with Ukraine will be global famineROGER BOYES
Two workers walk near a gas flare-off at the Mamontovskoye oil-fieldin Russia. Picture: Bloomberg.
- THE TIMES
- 12:12PM JANUARY 26, 2022
- 11 COMMENTS
Russia has always held open the option of deploying its natural gas supplies to the West as a weapon, one that could either complement its tank divisions or replace them. States that displeased the Kremlin were sometimes confronted with sudden “technical” pipeline issues in the midst of a cold winter. Gazprom officials visiting central and east European customers were treated like princelings, at least to their faces. Russian gas has become an instrument of punishment and reward.
Now the West is anxious that already high gas prices will add to a looming cost of living crisis at home. As the Russians tighten their stranglehold on Ukraine in an unusually stretched-out and public period of antebellum, so the price of short-term gas has climbed to three times the price in January last year, and six times the typical pre-pandemic level. When Russian gas supplies slumped before Christmas – supposedly because of unusually cold temperatures but probably also as a reminder to a new German government to approve quickly the Nord Stream 2 pipeline – prices soared even higher.
Russian gas has become an instrument of punishment and reward. Picture: Zuma Press.
The cost of energy is, of course, politically toxic. Not least in Britain as Ofgem prepares to raise its energy bill cap. Britain is less dependent than many of its European neighbours on Russian gas but it cannot stay immune from galloping global prices. If Russia marches into Ukraine, or even if it just prolongs the current stand-off through the winter, the stress on the gas market will render it more volatile than in a decade. For separate reasons, including an Iranian-backed Houthi rebel drone attack on the United Arab Emirates, oil has already hit a seven-year high this month and Brent crude seems set to reach $100 a barrel by September.
But it’s gas that is the problem and it is folly to look at the trends through a parochial spectrum. Natural gas is essential to the production of nitrogenous fertilisers, of urea, ammonium nitrate. For the past six months farmers across the world have struggled with the cost and scarcity of fertilisers. Unable to scrape together enough to fertilise and enrich their fields, unable to secure credit to tide them through to harvest, they warn that this year’s yields will be low.
Fertiliser plants are closing or operating at half strength because there is no way of predicting how far prices will rise. China has banned the export of phosphate fertiliser since last autumn to ensure its own farmers get enough. That hits India’s wheat sowing. The urea shortage has mobilised road-blocking protests by farmers in Pakistan; they complain that wheat output, sugar cane and maize will be affected.
Exhaust fumes rise from a Ukrainian heating plant in Kiev. Gazprom has said it would stop supplies to Ukraine while Moscow was also reducing coal deliveries to the country. Picture: EPA.
Here then is the knock-on effect of a confrontation between Russia and Ukraine: the potential for famine. Conventional political sloganeering in Britain suggests the hard-up face a winter choice between heating and eating. But what is beginning to happen worldwide goes well beyond that dilemma and its banal advice to put on a sweater and perform a few star jumps in the living room.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation predicts famine conditions affecting 45 million. “The world,” it says, “hasn’t faced such a risk of widespread famine affecting multiple countries so severely in over a decade.” That includes countries like Taliban-governed, difficult-to-access Afghanistan where severely malnourished children are overwhelming health centres. The menace of extreme weather will continue to flood and scorch arable land in Africa and Asia. Incompetently run states will continue to fail their vulnerable citizens.
The exploding cost of gas, however, has been impossible to plan for. Kim Jong-un’s North Korea, cut off from Chinese fertiliser, has instructed rural communities to supply their own manure, in the form of human excrement (euphemistically called “night soil").
Russian President Vladimir Putin awon’t hesitate to weaponise Russia’s energy supplies. Picture: AFP.
Access to markets is denied to farmers who can’t produce a manure pass, a logbook recording how much homemade fertiliser has been generated that week. North Korea is a famine barometer. It experienced terrible starvation in the 1990s when people were reduced to eating grass, so Kim has attuned his dictatorship to prepare for the worst in terms of food supply. Now he is not that far ahead of the loop. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, it seems, are saddling up. There’s nothing quite like the prospect of a European war to get the fabled demons – conquest, war, pestilence and famine – mounted and ready to wreak chaos. And famine always rides in last to claim those weakened by misgovernment and disease.
The way the West chooses to fight its battles often makes famine worse. A US warship recently intercepted a 40-ton load of fertiliser from Iran to Yemen. The cargo, said the US, could have been used as explosives and confiscated the lot. Syria can’t import nitrogenous fertilisers for a similar reason. And the US treasury is trying to get Lithuania to block the transport of potash fertiliser from Belarus, in order to punish dictator President Lukashenko.
This kind of blockade may penalise regimes but it comes with a price tag, the sacrifice of moral high ground to tyrants at the expense of their people. That’s why disconnecting Russia from the international payments system, should it invade Ukraine, is such a complex decision.
Strategic planners have spent decades worrying about World War III but they were missing the point. War, when it comes, will have some 20th-century features but probably won’t be fought in multiple interlocking theatres. Rather, the fighting will be swift and confined – but the victims will be worldwide.
The Times
Regards PhilipA
I think we are i a pretty good position but prices to farmers will probably go up.
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