gdy 105 million jv origin energy, page-81

Yeah, strolling through the quarterly expenditure, it's amazing to see such a cash burn at this market cap level. Really groundbreaking work here (ever get the feeling that geothermal is the ultimate pun victim?), probably the greatest Australian civil engineering project since the Snowy.

Here is some information I have been reading today if anyone is interested:

From the Fin:

"At the Australian Labor Party's official campaign launch in Brisbane yesterday, leader, Kevin Rudd, pledged to spend $890 million on climate change issues over a five-year period. Almost half of the funding would come from abolishing the Howard Government's low-emissions technology development fund. The Opposition said the funding would better prepare the Australian economy for the onset of a greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme because it would start to flow as early as 2008, unlike the Coalition's climate change fund, which would not kick in until after 2011."

"The announcement was welcomed by both The Climate Institute and The Clean Energy Council, with the latter claiming it would lead to increased investor confidence in the environmental sector."

From the Australian:

"LABOR'S new clean energy plan brings its commitments to climate change programs to more than $3billion on top of billions more to subsidise mandatory renewable energy supplies and household hot-water systems. Despite Kevin Rudd claiming to spend less than the Howard Government as part of his claim of economic responsibility, yesterday's announcements wrapped up a nine-month, multi-billion-dollar spending spree for Labor on climate change.

*The Coalition is yet to announce details of its main clean-energy support funding, which is expected to include an extension of its $500 million low-emissions technology development fund (LETDF) and about $200 million for new clean-coal research. To date, its main commitment in this area has been $75 million towards new and emerging renewable technologies. Yesterday's big addition to Labor's climate change shopping list is a $500 million renewable energy fund to help develop, commercialise and deploy renewable energy technologies, to complement its mandatory renewable energy target of 20 per cent by 2020.

*This will effectively replace the Howard Government's LETDF and will offer $1 for every $2 offered by industry to bring new technology beyond the demonstration stage. A further $240 million was promised yesterday by Mr Rudd to help business and industry deliver energy and water efficiency projects and a further $150million for an energy innovation fund to help retain scientists and researchers. The business fund will spend $90 million to retrofit commercial buildings to make them more energy efficient, $75 million in grants to make business more efficient and $75 million to help commercialise clean technologies."

From the Age:

"THE latest scientific research indicates global warming is happening faster than recent United Nations reports projected, while China and India's rapid economic growth means carbon emissions are rising quicker than expected, a Labor-backed panel into climate change has heard. Summer in the northern hemisphere over the past century had extended by 12 days, but in some areas, such as northern Norway, it was about six weeks longer, said Graeme Pearman, former chief of the CSIRO's atmospheric research.

"This is not something that's affecting people in 10, 20 or 30 years' time. It's now," he said. "The recent science has strengthened the concern that we may have underestimated the rate of change." Mr Pearman was one of several speakers at the third public forum of the Climate Change Review, appointed by state and territory Labor governments and chaired by Ross Garnaut. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is due to release its latest report on Saturday. As in previous reports, the IPCC would omit major ice melts from its sea-level projections, Mr Pearman said.

"Will the Greenland ice sheet start to disintegrate rapidly? We don't know," he said. "It's a real risk." Global carbon emissions, now running about 9 billion tonnes a year, are on course to top 16.5 billion tonnes by 2030, propelled by soaring pollution in China and India, according to research by Peter Sheehan, director of the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies at Victoria University. Asia would contribute about 10 billion tonnes of that total, compared with 6 billion tonnes predicted in earlier "worst-case" estimates, Professor Sheehan told the forum. "You get a serious under-reading of what's happening in Asia," he said.

"Nobody could have predicted the size of what's going on." Professor Garnaut, who is due to deliver his report on climate change and the Australian economy by mid-2008, said: "The view I've formed is that this is a truly diabolical policy problem . . . with a number of very great barriers to coming up with an optimal policy response." Higher oil prices may also prompt countries to burn more coal or source their energy from shale or tar sands, rather than reduce consumption. To date, high prices looked like being emissions-unfriendly, Professor Garnaut said."




All right, I know that's a lot of reading to dump in one post, but it is all very interesting, and I would just like to post this sentence again:


"The Opposition said the funding would better prepare the Australian economy for the onset of a greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme because it would start to flow as early as 2008, unlike the Coalition's climate change fund, which would not kick in until after 2011."

There is very strong upside for the SP of GDY, with the potential to provide consistent returns during the years of upcoming upgrades, expansions, and diversifications.