Premer Anna Bligh said Queensland Treasury had been tasked with investigating investment opportunities to fund the Connors River Dam and proposed Multi-Cargo Facility at Abbot Point.

A report examining funding models and options is expected to be completed by the end of this year, with the Government possibly in a position to approach the market in early 2012.

“Queensland taxpayers stand to benefit from the increased royalties the infrastructure investment will reap from enhanced export potential without having to foot the bill,” Mr Bligh said.

“The government’s plan is unashamedly to create opportunities for private sector investment that results in increased benefits for Queenslanders – be it through increased royalty revenues, new jobs or growth in our regional centres.

“Money speaks and business investment is flowing in Queensland, creating export capacity, developing our natural wealth and securing future prosperity.”

The proposed $2.6 billion Connors River dam and pipelines project involves a 49,500 megalitre dam and two pipelines; a 133 km pipeline from the dam to Moranbah and a 265 km pipeline from Moranbah to Alpha.

Ms Bligh said the projects would deliver reliable water supplies to the Bowen and Galilee coal basins as well as the townships of Nebo, Moranbah and Alpha.

“This massive project will underpin the water supply needs for the development of this resource industry corridor and the towns that support it,” Ms Bligh said.

“With the continued development of the Bowen Basin, and indeed the opening of the Galilee Basin, there is also strong demand for additional export capacity in the north of the state.

“Abbot Point represents a prime opportunity for additional export capacity which is why a business case is currently underway to capture the potential opportunity of combining development of the sites known as T2 to T7.”

Ms Bligh said the business case was due by the end of the year and start of construction of $2 billion-plus project targeted for 2014-15.

“Combine development of T2 to T7 in an offshore multi-cargo facility could provide for up to 12 cape-sizeable berths and tug harbour,” Ms Bligh said.

The Government has already awarded development rights of up to 60 mtpa to BHP and Hancock at T2 and T3; and T4 to T7 expansions is already in an expression of interest stage as companies look to secure future capacity

The Qld government – after selling off QR – will support mining companies that despoil the land via tax cuts and expemptions …

After a billion dollars plus on water infrastructure in SEQ, even more precious water and above costs to Queensland tax-payers will be allocated to water intensive mining processes for a pittance in royalties …

Will Yeelirie in Western Australia be a repeat of Ok Tedi?

Those less tactful in their observations might suggest that this decision was to open the way for mass exploitation by many – Australian – companies like BHP to ravage and destroy (on a massive scale) the environment with little concern of recourse.

BHP has since dissolved its 52% ownership in the mining company and walked away after paying an out-of-Court settlement of $28 million. [However the mine is still in operation and waste continues to flow into the river system. BHP was granted legal indemnity from future mine related damages].

The question of course is ‘will BHP Billiton really be an Australian company and at what point in time will it ‘dissolve’ its relationship with the Australian government?

Now we all know that politicians and senior bureaucrats are for sale to the highest bidder and the Australian Public is a ‘day-light to second’ place winner in these stakes, so let’s consider the track record of BHP in Papua New Guinea.

The mine operators discharge 80 million tons of tailings into the river system each year causing widespread and diverse harm, both environmentally and socially to some 50,000 people living in about 120 villages downstream of the mine. The chemicals in the tailings killed or contaminated fish (which the people of the surrounding villages still ate because fish are a staple part of their diet) and changed the riverbed, causing a relatively deep and slow river to become shallower and develop rapids thereby disrupting indigenous transportation routes.

Flooding caused by the raised riverbed, left a thick layer of contaminated mud on the flood plain among plantations of taro, bananas and sago palm, also staples of the local diet, with a 1300 square kilometres damaged in this way.  Copper concentration in the water was some 30 times above the standard level but alarmingly the World Health Organisation said it is still WHO standards.

The original plans included an Environmental Impact Statement done by an Australian Consultancy that called for a tailings dam to be built near the mine, allowing for heavy metals and solid particles to settle, before releasing the ‘clean high-water’ into the river system where remaining contaminants would be diluted. [don’t laugh, it’s true], but surprise, surprise, the plan was seriously flawed and a (regular for the area) earthquake in 1984 caused the half built dam to collapse; BHP continued operations without any dam, because they argued it would be too expensive to rebuild it.  Experts have predicted that it will take some 300 years to ‘clean up’ the toxic contamination.

So why should Australia allow BHP to dig up the most toxic substance on Earth … what are the enormous environmental impacts and health risks of allowing uranium mine in WA ?  The uranium mine planed by BHP Billiton at Yeelirie (about 550 kilometres east of Geraldton) may initially employ some 700 people for a about two years and then drop be more than half, but what will remain … lets consider our existing uranium experience.

• The Federal Government admitted that 100,000 litres of contaminated groundwater is seeping from tailings at Ranger uranium mine into Kakadu each day, so the potential impact of large-scale dewatering of the mine site at Yeelirie combined with heavy downpours is alarming.
• The mine’s yellowcake product is supposed to be taken inside sealed drums on existing roads from Yeelirie to a ‘secure’ rail facility near Kalgoorlie and then by train to Adelaide and then Darwin before going overseas. Trucking overland within Australia raises a concern; according to the Federal Department of Infrastructure and Transport, there are more than 2,000 serious truck accidents on WA roads each year, while the Australian Transport Safety Bureau reports there are on average more than 35 serious train derailments and collisions annually in WA.  Yellowcake powder (uranium oxide concentrate) is the consistency of talcum powder, so should a serious road or rail collision occur, people using the same transport routes or living nearby would be at risk of breathing in the dust.
• If the calculation is done of the embodied energy that goes into building a nuclear reactor, it is hard to see how anyone can possibly describe nuclear power as a low-carbon solution to greenhouse gas emissions and that the total energy produced by the nuclear plants will be less than all the energy that goes into digging up, refining, processing, building, commissioning, running and decommissioning a nuclear power plant, leaving aside the nuclear waste.
• The global nuclear industry has still not developed a solution to its waste problem; however, in the last 10 years, the multinational company Pangea has been lobbying hard in Australia for the establishment of an international nuclear waste here, which previous Prime Minister John Howard was apparently all for.

As Greens Senator Scott Ludlam points out;

1. ‘there is a relatively small number of new jobs, especially compared to renewable energies such as solar, which has created lasting employment for some 250,000 people in Germany’
2. ‘in its referral document to the Federal Department of Environment, BHP revealed that through an on-site leaching process, the proposed mine would produce 110 million tonnes of radioactive waste’
3. ‘it proposes that this huge amount of rock and sludge would be stored at the mine site in an open pit or tailings dam, where it would remain dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years.
4. ‘this means that once the mine opens, mine workers and anyone else in the area would be at risk on windy days of breathing in dust or random gas blown off the tailings.; these radioactive materials greatly increase the risk of cancer if ingested.
5. ‘BHP says 10,000 hectares of mostly well vegetated land would be disturbed by the mine; this area is home to six threatened animal species, 11 migratory birds and a number of rare and priority-listed plant species,
6. ‘the site experiences intense rain at times, causing water to flow in sheets off the proposed mine site towards nearby lakes.

You need to contact your local State and Federal member/s and tell them in no uncertain words that you don’t want Yeelirie to be Australia’s Ok Tedi …

Lady Flo Bjelke-Petersen (widow of Sir Joh), indicated she will fight plans to mine the family property at Kingaroy in the state’s south-east. Cougar Energy has been granted a development licence to build an underground coal gasification plant and eventually a 400 megawatt power station, which includes the right to explore land to the north of its licence for coal; that exploration permit includes the Bjelke-Petersen properties.

The property has been in the family since 1913 and of course Lady Flo would like to be buried beside Joh; the Queensland state government has had scant regard for anyone or the environment, allowing massive land degradation, so it should be business as usual.

The Fairview collapse “was to do with getting the funding balance right”, according to a Santos spokesperson quoted in the Australian Financial Review last Friday. That, of course, is code for “we want more money from governments”, tactfully argued by a company whose last half-year profits were $304 million and whose project has already been handed $75 million in taxpayer funds.

The Fairview collapse echoed the failure early this year of the global pin-up for coal geosequestration, FutureGen in the United States. FutureGen, which the Howard government had invested in, alongside various other governments and coal multinationals, fell over after the Bush Administration decided it was too far over budget and behind time to justify continued funding.

Of course, taxpayers in Australia, the US and elsewhere, would be entitled to ask why they should pay at all for cleaning up the act of an industry that has made many billions of dollars in profits out of polluting our planet for more than two centuries. BHP Billiton made a record US$15 billion last year and Rio Tinto US$7.4 billion. If these corporate giants were interested in cleaning up their act, they would pay for it out of their mammoth profits. It is both bad economic policy and a direct breach of the polluter pays principle to spend taxpayers’ money doing their job for them.

The question of who should pay for developing geosequestration technology, however, is only one of the issues that the Rudd Government has ignored as it does everything it can to make sure the coal industry is not left out of pocket. Despite a host of unanswered technical and legal questions, Rudd Government ministers rarely (if ever) mention climate change without making sure to point out that the coal sector has never had a better friend.

By supporting these so-called “clean coal” projects with funding, the Rudd Government is delaying recognition of just how limited their real-world usefulness actually is. It was not funding issues, for instance, that knocked over Hydrogen Energy inWA, a major joint venture between Rio Tinto and BP. It was the small fact, somehow overlooked in the initial work that they trumpeted around the world last year, that the geological formation off Perth that they were planning to fill with carbon had a large hole in it.

This exposes a key technical problem that is starting to worry even some inside the coal sector itself: where can you find enough safe storage space to bury permanently the vast quantities of carbon dioxide that our coal power plants pump out every year?

Australia’s coal power emissions alone would require permanent safe storage more than 2500 times the size of the storage trial started recently in the Otways – 250 million tonnes every year. According to Shell, a full system to transport carbon captured from the world’s power stations to storage would mean moving twice the volume of the entire current global gas industry.

The larger the amount of storage and transport, the more likely it is that corners will be cut, second-rate storage used, and leakage will occur.  Leakage on any scale, of course, defeats the whole purpose of the exercise. Billions of dollars would have been spent capturing, transporting and storing carbon dioxide for nothing. But, in addition, leakage also brings the liability monster bubbling to the surface.

The coal corporations are following in the footsteps of the nuclear industry, telling governments that no progress will be made until they are absolved of any liability in case stored carbon leaks. In other words – yet again – they want to privatise the profits and socialise the risk.

Following the bailouts of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Northern Rock and others caught up in the sub-prime crisis, where government have been forced to carry the can for failed capitalist enterprises, one might have thought that governments would be reluctant to set themselves up for a similar fall with geosequestration. However, the Rudd Government has conspicuously failed to deal with the issue of liability before committing many hundreds of millions of dollars to another industry with an even higher chance of failure. The regulatory framework that the Government currently has before Parliament squibs on the issue, leaving open the question of who will carry liability after a storage site is closed.

The Government’s support for coal and geosequestration goes hand in glove with its position that Australia can get away with high emissions for decades into the future. The fatal flaw of coal, even with ideal geosequestration efficiency, is that it will always emit some carbon dioxide – and that amount won’t be less than 10 per cent of current coal. The deeper the emissions cuts you need to achieve, the less relevant carbon capture becomes. In a world where we only needed to reduce emissions marginally over a long time – say 60 per cent by 2050, as is the Government’s aim – geosequestration might be an option. But that isn’t our world.

The science is clear that we are already entering the zone of dangerous climate change, and that minimising the risk of catastrophic, runaway change means heading for net zero emissions as soon as feasible.  In our real world, we need zero emissions energy sources, and we need them fast. Coal with geosequestration doesn’t fit the bill.

It’s hard to see how this plan of the Government’s is actually going to amount to anything. When we have had no more success than anyone else in the world, why is the Government throwing $100 million each year at a making Australia a global hub for technical and legal knowledge on coal? Will the world really come to us for advice when our projects are falling over? Will governments be inspired by our legal expertise when we have failed to even address the largest regulatory issue facing the industry?

Surely it would have been better to invest that money into bringing home our world-leading solar scientists – the Australians who have fled to Germany, China and the USA in recent years to get the support they deserve and the situation demands?  As one of the world’s sunniest countries, we should be making Australia the global solar hub, the Saudi Arabia of solar, demonstrating baseload solar thermal power, the world’s most efficient solar cells, solar water heating and the best possible regulatory measures to roll out all those alternatives.

Instead of giving us that inspiring vision, Rudd is responding to growing economic and environmental uncertainty by deepening Australia’s vulnerability to those problems. This “clean coal” funding is simply throwing more money at a solution which does nothing except make it seem acceptable for us to keep mining huge amounts of coal.

Rudd’s research institute is unlikely to produce any real results -wasting money that could be far better spent on truly clean renewable energy and energy efficiency alternatives – technologies that have already leapfrogged clean coal’s “best case” scenario, and actually work

Those governments are being forced to choose whether to reduce power to their 1.4 billion residents or curtail energy supplies to the world’s biggest copper, aluminium, platinum and gold factories.

The energy used by China’s aluminium smelters each week could provide enough power for more than 2 million people for an entire year.

Runaway growth in emerging markets that’s squeezing world oil supplies has led to electricity shortages, cutting output of commodities needed for ever-rising demand.

Platinum jumped to a record in January after mines in South Africa closed for five days as utilities rationed power.

Cobalt gained 58 % in the past year as production growth in the Democratic Republic of Congo was limited by electricity supply.

Metals are headed for a seventh straight year of price increases even as the worst U.S. housing slump reduced consumption in the world’s biggest economy.

Investors added $40 billion to funds indexed to commodity prices in the first quarter, more than in all of 2007, Citigroup Inc. estimates.

Platinum, used in jewellery and car parts, climbed 25 percent since the end of December to $1,911 an ounce in New York today, while aluminium gained 21 percent to $2,920 a metric ton on the London Metal Exchange and copper climbed 26 percent to $8,410 a tons on the LME.

Rio Tinto Group, the second-biggest aluminium producer, cut output at its New Zealand smelter by 5 percent, or 1,400 metric tons a month, on May 1 because of power constraints caused by drought. Anglo Platinum Ltd., the world’s biggest producer of that metal, said April 29 that first-quarter output plunged 24 percent to 428,600 ounces because of cuts in the supply of electricity to its South African mines.

Congo, the world’s largest source of cobalt – used in batteries and jet engines – asked mining companies May 2 to cut electricity use after power-transmission cables were stolen. Credit Suisse Group, Switzerland’s second-biggest bank by assets, raised its 2008 cobalt forecast by 50 percent to $45 a pound on March 26 because of Congo’s electricity shortages. The price was at $48.50 on May 2, according to Metal Bulletin data.

Smelting aluminium uses about four times as much power as for copper and more than twice that of zinc, according to Barclays Capital. About 80% of world aluminium smelting capacity is in nations at risk of electricity shortages, according to Citigroup. Energy availability in the next 10 years is going to be a very important issue to the mining sector and are seen as structural changes, not cyclical changes. China built 549.3 billion yuan ($79 billion) of generators and power lines last year, according to state officials. Accelerating demand will tighten the nation’s power supply again within two years, according to Citigroup, which estimates shortages there cut first-quarter copper output by 40,000 tons, zinc by 125,000 tons and aluminium by 600,000 tons.

Electricity supplies remain “tight” in more than half of China, the nation’s top economic planner said last week, adding that warm weather may cut hydropower output this summer. Energy shortages in South Africa, the world’s largest source of platinum, may last seven years, state-owned utility Eskom Holdings Ltd. forecasts. Rationing there looks likely until new power plants start up in 2012, Goldman Sachs JBWere Pty said. Eskom is cutting electricity across cities and rationing power to industry including BHP Billiton Ltd. and Anglo Platinum, which mines a third of the world’s supply of the metal. South Africa produces 10 percent of the world’s gold and 78 percent of its platinum.

Chile – the world’s biggest copper producer – faces the risk of energy rationing after the worst drought in 50 years lowered hydropower reserves amid a shortage of natural gas for generators. Copper may have further to increase. In inflation-adjusted terms, the price hasn’t yet reached a record, according to Barclays. In real terms, the metal is trading close to levels last seen a century ago, when the U.S. economy was expanding and the nation was being wired for electricity. China, which is making a similar transformation, is building power stations and transmission lines that are exacerbating deficits in metals supply. As much as 80 percent of China’s grid investment is spent on copper, said Yuan Genfa, secretary general of the Shanghai Electric Wire & Cable Industry Association. Over 50 percent of China’s copper use is electrical use, on the electricity grid.