The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand | The Bullroarer

9 comments on The Bullroarer - Saturday 31st May 2008

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Boof on May 31, 2008 - 7:50pm

Q: what more can State and Federal politicians do to help the coal industry?
A: nothing, they're doing everything they can.

This Queensland coal seam methane had better turn out to be a biggie because I think it has to plug into the SE natural gas network. I note the SA desal projects won't say what their mystery energy source is but apart from the Pt Augusta solar I presume it will be electrically powered reverse osmosis.

Long term that may require Queensland CSM to compensate for depletion of the natural gas which fuels electrical generation. Pt Stanvac will boost Adelaide's water supply and Pt Bonython will serve Olympic Dam. If the latter goes gas fired electricity->RO it means fossil fuels underwrite nuclear so I guess the critics were right all along.

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Cretaceous on June 2, 2008 - 8:04am

In NSW, our Premier Morris Iemma had the brilliant idea of using hydro-electricity to power the Kurnell desal!

When people started to ridicule the concept of sluicing huge amounts of water out of dams to produce a much smaller amount of desalinated seawater in the city, the document was quietly removed from the NSW Govt websites and Morris now states that Kurnell will be powered by "100% wind" ...Well he said it, not me!
("Far Kurnell" indeed!)

Also I'm still gobsmacked by the way that the head of The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE), Philip Glyde, explicitly rejected the entire notion of Peak Oil only a few days ago!
- This despite everything that's going on with pump prices, and the media full of nothing but Energy talk!
(Link to verbatim Senate Committee transcript on http://anz.theoildrum.com/node/4067).

Glyde may argue that he just puts forecasts out and that as long as he publishes his assumptions then it doesn't matter if the forecasts are wrong, but this "head in the (tar) sand" approach does real damage. Today on the ABC Insiders program, Lindsay Tanner, the Finance Minister, said that essentially nobody could say where oil prices are going, and implied that building more freeways was the solution!

The transcript is on http://www.abc.net.au/insiders/content/2007/s2261523.htm.

BARRIE CASSIDY: ...Maybe it is time for a bit of blunt advice, that you start telling people that you're stuck with higher petrol prices, and they ought to think about adjusting.

LINDSAY TANNER: Look, I don't think anybody's in a position to know that that's the position for the future, Barrie.

But certainly we have got to prepare for that possibility. Our cities are creaking at the seams. They're all getting too congested.

We've got infrastructure problems that are the result of ten, 12 years of neglect in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne in particular. That's why we've established the Building Australia fund, that's why we're committed to investing in infrastructure.

Because that's one of the significant elements that causes people to have to use a lot of petrol.

All of this confusion at the top leadership level of our country is at least partially due to ABARE and their "la la land" forecasts!

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