Queensland Gas generated plenty of excitement yesterday when it announced plans for a Hunter Valley power station to be supplied from Queensland’s vast coal-seam methane gas reserves.
There is so much coal-seam-methane gas in Australia’s eastern states that it remains an absolute travesty that NSW is selling good black coal to its power stations at about $12 a tonne, when it could be exported for ten times more.
Few people know it, but there is also an emerging view in Victoria that the Gippsland basin potentially has more gas reserves than either Queensland or the North West Shelf.
Yet the Victorians who will vote in the Gippsland by-election continue to burn dirty brown coal in the La Trobe Valley that does more than anything else to deliver Australia the world’s worst record for carbon emissions on a per capita basis.
While the green purists and climate change deniers can dream about “clean coal”, wind, solar and geo-sequestration, developing baseload capacity from these technologies is at least 15 years away.
Australia should be closing down coal-fired power stations and building a stack of new gas-fired power plants right now. Instead, we’re years behind because John Howard was so captured by the carbon club.
We’d actually make money out of the gas switch when you consider the increased coal exports – plus Australia would be feted the world over for achieving the biggest cuts in carbon emissions.
The $14 billion bid from British Gas for Origin Energy has alerted the world to the huge value in coal-seam methane gas, yet the debate seems to be exclusively focused on Queensland.
It’s time we explored the huge reserves of brown coal in Victoria because brown coal is 60% water, 20% gas and 20% carbon.
As Queensland Gas spindoctor Hedley Thomas keeps telling everyone, clean water is one of the by-products from coal-seam methane gas production. We had this statement from the company on May 18:
QGC invests in applications for large volumes of water yielded during the release of coal seam gas. The water has the potential to help drought-affected communities, towns and farms in the Surat Basin.
And here is Victoria planning to spend $3.1 billion on a desalination plant not far from the La Trobe Valley when it could pursue a strategy of coal seam gas-fired power stations that throw off heaps of fresh water.
With a price on carbon coming and the Federal Government expected to reap about $20 billion from the sale of permits, planning for this revolution in the La Trobe Valley should be moving full steam ahead.
I gave this revolutionary scenario a big push with Lindy Burns on 774 ABC Melbourne last Tuesday, but there has been precisely no follow-up.
Maybe John Brumby should poach Hedley Thomas from Queensland Gas to co-ordinate the spin campaign because Victoria has a great coal-seam methane gas story to tell yet few people know about it.
*Check out Stephen Bartholomeusz’s excellent analysis on the QGC power station play on Business Spectator
Pauline Roberts is right. Whether we burn or export coal we are still responsible for the CO2 produced. We should go for a non C)2 solution as soon as posible although I think the carbon lobby will prevent this approach and in my grandchilrens’ lifetime they will experience the 3 plus degree celcius of global warming that ABARE are planning for. Whether our world will suvive this I do not know but at least we will know that the carbon pepole will die wealthy.
Mr Mayne is indeed correct that gas fired power stations make more sense economically and environmentally. Something Blind Freddy could see which clearly escaped John Howard and his cronies.
One of the reasons Victoria doesn’t export its brown coal is because it’s too filthy to export overseas – buyers have made it very clear they don’t want our toxic, heavy-metal laden, high ash residue coal. So Victoria gets to burn it and then landfill the toxic fly ash residue itself to pollute its own water supplies and land instead. Not smart.
Coal isn’t clean and never will be, regardless of what the greenwashing World Wide Fund for Nature etc that support this mining-backed fallacy of carbon sequestration hope. I repeat, bio-toxic heavy metals (arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury etc ) and carcinogenic benzenes to name but a few of the contaminants are not clean to dig up, transport, wash or burn. Nor is – obviously – coal-water or methane-coal-seam-derived water ‘clean’ either whether you have ‘heaps of the stuff’ or not. This water needs considerable processing to get it even to ‘stock’ water quality and that costs money. Then what to do with the toxic sludge remaining? More landfill?
Substantial de-watering of strata (coal seams or otherwise) has been demonstrated over and over to cause subsidence and earth tremors which have already, for example, closed mines in Germany. Dr Christian Klose’s research in 2007 postulated that an unloading of the Hunter Mooki Fault, due to the removal of water and coal from the Newcastle area over the last 100 years may have been a significant contributor to the Newcastle Earthquake. Thanks to the mainstream media, few people know that either.
As for making money out of the dash to gas; we really are only shoveling our problem overseas by then exporting more coal, so how we could then be lauded for emission reduction even with gas-fired power stations would make a remarkable piece of political fiddling whilst the planet burns.
By the way, NSW’s Gunnedah-Liverpool Plains Basin also has great methane production potential, but BHP are hoping to dig it up first for more toxic coal, ruining one of Australia’s world class farming areas (and we don’t have a lot), and wrecking its truly clean underground aquifers (see http://www.riverssos.com for their handiwork to date down South) into the bargain. (Mixing good water with poisonous coal water is not smart.)
Since we are already in a hole with coal, surely it’s time to stop digging. Gas makes more sense but never at the expense of the integrity and quality of the water supplies of the second driest continent – surely.