In 2017 Australia faced a severe shortage of gas. Nothing as serious as the petrol and diesel crisis we face today, but a serious problem nonetheless.
As Resources Minister, I sat down with one of my top geologists and asked him a straight question: “Where is the best place to drill for gas in Australia?”
Without hesitation or irony – geologists are matter of fact people – he replied: “The Great Barrier Reef.”
I nearly spat out my weet-bix. Once regaining my composure I said: “You will never say that again.”
We don’t need to take such radical action to guarantee our liquid fuel security, although an example near the reef shows what we can do.
About a decade ago I visited a refinery in Gladstone, just a stone’s throw from the Great Barrier Reef.
There, a company called Queensland Energy Resources was producing jet fuel from the surrounding onshore shales.
They were not mining the reef, but this was the old reef from when the shoreline was higher than it is today.
These shales are full of hydrocarbons (a fancy word for oil and gas). So you can dig them up, crush them, heat them up and like magic you can run a car, a tractor or even a jet engine with them.
The pilot worked. The technology is off the shelf. However, it is an expensive form of oil production compared to the “sweet’’ crudes that are abundant in the Arabian Peninsula.
Now that oil prices are skyrocketing, we need to investigate whether we can ramp up shale oil production ASAP.
We should also look at biofuels and coal to liquids options too.
Things could get dire fast. We may within weeks have to decide who gets petrol and diesel and who doesn’t.
That will mean priority is given to food production, mining, industry, transport, health and other life and death uses. It may mean that commuting and holidaying are locked down just as they were in Covid.
That will be an inconvenience for the rich who may be looking forward to a European summer holiday. But it is from the rich class that we have had to suffer through lectures about the evil of fossil fuels over recent years.
I am not going to cop lectures from the ABC – and other left wing media outlets – that we have not done enough to secure our petrol and diesel supplies.
I, and my colleagues in The Nationals and Liberal Parties, have fought for years to drill, baby, drill. But every step of the way we have been frustrated by a cabal of Labor environmental groups, overseas funded campaign outfits and an activist left-wing media.
Even before Iran, there was some renewed hope. Earlier this year the Queensland Government opened up the Taroom Trough which has the potential to be the first major oil province since the 1970s.
The Basin likely holds hundreds of millions of barrels and it shares much of the geology of the most prolific basins in the United States.
Those basins have seen the US go from the biggest net importer of oil to the biggest producer of oil in a generation.
Australia also has enormous oil reserves in the Great Australian Bight.
Over the past 10 years both BP and Equinor, a Norwegian oil company, were keen to start drilling, but they were scared off by green activism.
And then there is the Canning Basin. It is a remote area in northwestern Australia, but our geologists estimate that it could have 40 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
That would make it the size of the Texas oil industry.
Our lack of fuel security is a choice. A choice we have made to prioritise net zero over the basic essentials of life. Green ideology is a luxury we can no longer afford.
By opening up new oil and gas basins, we won’t have to be worried about not being able to fill up the car again. What this crisis has shown is that the world still runs on fossil fuels.
No one is calling for Australia to establish a strategic wind reserve. We must develop our oil and gas resources to keep Australia moving.
