A bit more of the big picture for the industry MEL is operating in - offsets some of the negative news being directed at the CSG industry
Regards DB
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"CSG: a Queensland success story - Belinda Robinson The case for Coal Seam Gas: Belinda Robinson is the chief executive of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association.
Senator Christine Milne last week described coal seam gas as �a disaster for Australia�, which may well tell you everything you need to know about the Australian Greens, the party's fundamental beliefs, and some concerning inconsistencies within its policy positions.
Far from being a disaster, Australia's coal seam gas industry is an economic and an environmental revelation.
Advertisement: Story continues below In 2008, CSG was a niche industry supplying a majority of Queensland's gas - but not much more.
Yet as the populations in countries on our northern doorstep grow and as hundreds of millions are pulled out of poverty, they have looked to Australia for a cleaner energy supply solution.
Australia has a lot of CSG: as much as 250 trillion cubic feet according to the CSIRO, which is enough to power a city of 1 million people for 5000 years.
And it is a relatively clean fuel too. It produces around half the CO2 of black coal when used to produce electricity and almost 70 per cent less than brown coal.
Today, we have two liquefied natural gas export facilities under construction in the Queensland port of Gladstone at a cost of more than $15 billion each.
And remarkably, we have two larger projects for Gladstone at advanced stages of planning and approval, meaning country Queensland has suddenly found itself an $80 billion industry looking to employ 18,000 Queenslanders and expected to pay $800 million in state taxes every year.
A �disaster� indeed.
And what of the greenhouse gas implications of this new industry? Yes, it is true that extracting and processing this gas is energy intensive � and so too is shipping it to the energy-hungry economies of China, India, Malaysia, Japan, and Korea.
But Senator Milne's handlers would do well to provide her with a copy of the summary of a report released last month by WorleyParsons. The report compares the amount of greenhouse gas emissions associated with Chinese power generators using Australian LNG derived from coal seam gas with those using imported black coal across the entire life cycle.
It found that for every tonne of CO2 emissions associated with the CSG-LNG production and use, up to 4.3 tonnes of emissions are avoided in China when used instead of coal by power generators.
It also found that a project exporting 10 million tonnes of LNG per annum to China could avoid more than 37 million tonnes of global CO2 emissions each year.
This means that over a 30-year project life, such a project could avoid nearly 1.1 billion tonnes of CO2, which is more than double Australia's total annual greenhouse gas emissions. And each of Gladstone's four projects is expected to export more than 10 million tonnes per year.
As last week's Climate Commission report so clearly demonstrates, the whole world needs to reduce greenhouse emissions, not just Australia.
Around 80 per cent of Chinese electricity currently comes from coal, so using Australian gas to substitute for just some of that will clearly make a material difference to global emissions. In fact, selling our gas to the world is possibly the most meaningful, practical and significant thing that Australia can do to reduce global emissions.
Yet the Greens continue to deny what is so clear, to so many.
Senator Milne this week continued to rail against the gas industry as �just another fossil fuel� and again called for Australia to move to 100 per cent renewable energy �as soon as possible�.
An admirable goal. But just how soon is �as soon as possible�?
Senator Milne can't say, but the following might assist.
If we put the obvious cost implications of such a move to one side for a moment (as some are so willing to do), we soon come up against an even more interesting challenge.
The Academy of Technological Science & Engineering's report on �The hidden costs of electricity� launched by the then-Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner in 2009 explains that around 20,000 MW of solar thermal power would be needed to replace 10 per cent of Australian electricity supply.
Using the world-leading solar technology used in Spain (so often lauded by Senator Milne and her colleagues) would require, says ATSE, about 870 square kilometres of solar plants to supply 10 per cent of current national electric energy consumption.
That's almost 9000 square kilometres of appropriate Australian grid-connected landscape to run the country on solar power.
And of course, these plants do not appear without significant dependence upon a few of the �big polluters� so frequently demonised by the Greens.
On ATSE numbers, delivering just 10 per cent of Australia's current electricity consumption from solar power would require use of around 22 million tonnes of concrete (nearly six months' supply of national production) and 6.4 million tonnes of reinforcing steel (that's eight years' worth of national production).
Outright opposition to viable and sensible energy options is a not only a vote of support for the status quo, it impedes the thoughtful and intelligent energy debate that we need to have.
Voltaire remarked that perfect is the enemy of good. We can continue to hold out for perfect � affordable, practical, no emission energy � but if we do, we will be sacrificing good, cleaner, affordable energy and accepting that future energy policy is simply more of the same."
Read more: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/environment/csg-a-queensland-success-story-20110530-1fcdv.html#ixzz1NyNcJFeG May 31, 2011 - 11:20AM
MEL Price at posting:
32.0¢ Sentiment: LT Buy Disclosure: Held
