Whatever the merits of shale oil it seems that the Queensland Government has come to its senses by banning shale oil developments in the Whitsundays, and everywhere else for that matter, and specifically a plan to dig up 400,000 tonnes of the muck to see whether anything useful could be done with it.
The locals should be immensely relieved, in spite of foregoing 3000 jobs. Imagine that! A Queensland premier foregoing a resource development with 3000 jobs attached!
If you read the linked articles the shale oil monster has not quite been killed dead and I don’t think this means that Anna Bligh has finally “got it” in terms of the urgency of dealing with climate change mitigation. The notion that we can deal with the rapidly emerging problem in a leisurely way runs deep. In an interesting post last week Barry Brook tried to identify some of the deep irrationalities that prevent the necessary action from being taken.
First, people are notoriously bad at judging risk. A threat of this nature and scale is without precedent.
Second, there is a tendency to take the middle ground. In this case that leaves us exposed to risks beyond measure.
Third, we traditionally use a marginal cost-benefit analysis method in approaching these sorts of problems. This is unsuitable because the underlying economic base itself is under threat short of radical action.
Have a look at Barry’s post. It’s well worthwhile.
More scary stuff, based on sound science, is entering the MSM domain. Today there was an item on a new book on the security implications of climate change. The author was new to climate change science before undertaking his research, talked to leading scientists and found them “really scared” about the way things are developing. He concluded that you really wouldn’t want to be here during the second half of this century. (I’ll insert the link when it becomes available.) [Here's the link]
Meanwhile this evening at 6pm Australia Talks is having a look at the prospects for geothermal power generation. These sessions are often very interesting, though spoiled a bit sometimes by the need to give voice to ratbags in the name of ‘balance’. This one should be OK. (As usual, I need to declare owning a few shares in Geodynamics.)
It is a moratorium I have not a shred of confidence in.
Yes it seems timed to fit the election cycle. Once re-elected there will be a govt/industry sponsored pilot study, an industry funded demonstration plant with ‘bucket loads’ of self-regulated environmental restrictions. I hope I’m wrong but if there is a similar gung-ho approach to ethanol from Queensland crops and a ‘limited’ exploratory drill offshore of say Fraser Island (ie not the GBR) then what’s a little on-shore exploitation of shale oil in comparison?
OOps I’ve misread the 20 year ban. That’s a little more definitive than a two year moratorium. But what is the Pineapple Party position on shale oil?
Some statist ratbags are already sniffing a chance to ramp up the state sector. I’d like to see a broad left consensus emerge that counters the authoritarian narrative.
Something like, market solutions, that although far from perfect, are generally preferable to top-down state solutions… and if the state sector is to beefed up then the overall size and power of the state should be reduced in a proportional way.
For example by canceling expensive tank and jet-fighter orders so that the overall size and power of the state remains manageable. A small minority of authoritarians keep giving the vast majority of the left that is democratic and libertarian.
Some regular statements by us rejecting totalitarianism would be welcome.
On shale oil from the news reports it seems that:
1. There is a 20-year moratorium on all mining activities and exploration at the shale oil prospect at Proserpine (the gateway to the Whitsundays).
2. No new shale oil mines will be permitted anywhere in the state.
3. At Gladstone, where there is an existing lease “small-scale demonstration plants using shale oil from the Stuart resource… would still be allowed, but only if companies got a licence and their technology passed strict environmental standards.”
4. The Government “signalled that other big developments will be canned if they threaten Queensland’s pristine environment.”
The puzzling bit is this:
With a bit of luck it might be just window dressing to justify foregoing a major development, and perhaps then canning the one at Gladstone.
I don’t know what the Pineapple Party thinks.
In response to the ‘hot rocks’ issue, I was concerned to hear the estimate of up to 20 years before this energy source could be proven.
Also the overwheening rational economics approach to these issues seems to me to neglect some of the more irrational human behaviours that we can expect. Stringent water restrictions gave us a hint of what might lie in store where neighbour could be pitted against neighbour, the distant worker getting compensated against the equally deserving who somehow fails the ETS threshold compensation test. This could get very nasty but we’re not hearing much on this in what to me seems like an indian summer, the calm before the storm.
pablo, I’ll come back to the hot rocks thing, hopefully later tonight. First, here’s the link the the story on The World Today. The guy concerned is Gwynne Dyer. He’s the one who got me into a spot of bother about his road to perdition allegory.
He’ll be talking with Phillip Adams on Late Night Live tonight, repeated tomorrow afternoon. There’ll be more gloom and doom for sure. This is what he says about the 2C plus world (from about 2040):
Some of these futuristic defense reports not only assume cross-border chaos as food production and sea level inundation shakes loose millions of people, rather they assume that there will be state failure in advanced democracies as elites try to triage assistance to those who are deemed to be worth saving.
I’d really like someone with more sociological and pol-sci knowledge to take a look at these issues. If I get time in the future I might try to set up a post that at least opens up the issues.
There were several articles in the dead tree edition of the Courier mail and an editorial, all condemning the Qld Government. It seems some folks are more concerned about the investment climate. The shale oil ban comes after a ban on uranium mining and a lift in coal royalties. It seems we’ve given up on more oil than they have in Nigeria.
The main beef seems two-fold. One is that the normal process involves an environmental scan. Business thinks that due process should not have been curtailed.
The other is that companies have already laid out good money on planning. There was talk of $200 million on the part of QER, but it’s hard to see where that would have been spent. A company called Blue Ensign with deposits at Julia Creek reckon they have spent $5.5 million on the Randall process in the past 2 years to develop an “environmentally friendly oil shale industry”. They were about to raise another $1 million. Now they’ll probably fold. I did wonder whether there would be any demands for compensation.
The Government has defended the decision, the Whitsunday Regional mayor has welcomed the announcement and the conservationists are happy.
It does seem as though there is going to be a demonstration plant at Gladstone, and the Mayor there wants it done greener this time.
The Pineapple party has still said nothing AFAIK.
pablo, on “hot rocks” the Australia Talks session had some good new information and some negative stuff, much of it nonsense. Prof David Harries of Murdoch University seemed very cautious and brought up a heap of problems, like loss of water, radioactive material coming up with the water, scouring, sustainable flows so that you don’t cool the rock down there, distance from markets etc. He was saying 15 years.
The Indian guy from ANU (?) who had worked with the industry clearly thought the negatives were excessive and most of the problems had been solved. The Geodynamics bloke came on late in the show and didn’t get much of a go.
Prof Klaus Regenauer-Lieb, of the Geothermal Centre of Excellence Western Australia was a good deal more positive and said, yes, somewhere between 3 years and 15 years, 3 years being how long it took to get geothermal electricity into the grid in France.
It seems that the Australian Geothermal Energy Association who have just had a conference have produced a report saying they should be able to supply “up to 40% of the Federal Government’s 2020 Renewable Energy Target (RET) of 45,000 GWHs – the equivalent of the output of around 6000 MW of wind farms” by 2020, which I think was about the same as WorleyParsons were shooting for. The geothermal mob are claiming theirs will be the cheapest renewable energy.
Geodynamics are still shooting for a substantial station entering the grid about 2015 and claim it will be cost effective including transmission. Origin Energy own 30% of the joint venture, and I’m hoping they know what they are doing.
Not once in the hour was the baseload capacity of geothermal mentioned.
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Yes, FDB, our spam filter isn’t perfect!
thanks for the updates Brian.
Ditto Brian, much appreciated. I thought Prof Harries was overly cautious. Since Tim Flannery is also an investor in hot rocks, maybe he could be encouraged to ‘spruik’ behind the scenes….to boost the profile somewhat.
One item not dissected from that ABC program was the perceived danger of earthquakes in a couple of the european sites. Is that real or imagined?
The earthquake thing was a surprise to me. They did emphasise that it’s well-known in oil drilling and because of the remoteness of the sites in Oz it’s not a worry hear.
I googled and it definitely happened in Basel in in December 2006 and again in January 2007. It seems that Basel was flattened in 1356 in the biggest earthquake evah in central Europe. They get 3 or 4 shakes a year, so it’s hard to pin those to the geothermal project.
There seems to have been further interest in August 2007 after an article that mentions an MIT study.
An article in Treehugger is interesting. It mentions 70 to 80 projects in Germany, but also that the 1989 Newcastle earthquake was caused by coal mining, and caused more damage than the value of the coal mined.
Along the way I turned up a report on Marn launching the Govt’s $50 million geothermal drilling fund. so there’s no need to enlist Tim Flannery, Marn’s on the job!
On shale oil, there was a letter to the editor of the Courier mail today from Daniel Gschwind, who has been Chief executive of the Queensland Tourist Industry council about as long as I can remember. Gschwind praises the Bligh government for the moratorium on the Whitsunday shale oil project and points out that on Federal govt figures tourism brings $6 billion of economic activity to the area each year.
There was also a letter from Rob McCreath of the Friends of Felton. They are campaigning against the Felton Valley project near Toowoomba which is going to mine 12 million tonnes of coal each year and turn it into petrol. He reckons it will cause 3 tonnes of CO2 for every tonne of liquid fuel, wreck the habitat of some endangered species, drain underground aquifers and contaminate a major recharge area and pollute Hodgson’s Creek in the headwaters of the Murray-Darling.
And so on for the next 40 years while they chew their way through 900 million tonnes of coal.
Nice one Anna!