A few weeks ago, I attended an “Industry Breakfast” organised by Advance Rockhampton.
One of the updates was from Stanwell, the Government owned company which runs the Stanwell coal power station just west of Rockhampton, as well as the coal fired power station at Tarong in the Burnett Valley.
Stanwell was spruiking the Queensland Government’s plan to shut these power stations by 2035, which will put over 1000 people out of a job.
Stanwell wanted to assure us that this will be fine because there will be even more jobs in renewable energy and hydrogen.
Just hours after this breakfast, Twiggy Forrest announced that he was scrapping his company’s target to produce 15 million tonnes of hydrogen by the end of the decade. At the same time, he announced he was sacking 700 people.
Twiggy Forrest has been a courageous and successful Australian businessman.
He took on the biggest Australian companies in Rio Tinto and BHP to build his own iron ore company independent of their control.
He was close to ruin many times but came through that to be one of the richest Australians.
He has done pioneering work helping indigenous Australians get a start in life including as employees in his own company.
I worked with him as Resources Minister and have great respect for him.
But I do not think we should mortgage our futures to his vision.
Twiggy is a businessman not a prophet.
He got many things right in his iron ore ventures but that is no guarantee that he will be right about hydrogen.
The old physics joke is that “hydrogen is 20 years away”.
It has just always been 20 years away!
As if to confirm the wisdom behind that quip, 40 years ago Joh Bjelke-Peterson was promoting an XD Fairlane that had been “converted” to hydrogen fuel as a solution to the 1970s oil crisis.
That did not work out either.
Twiggy has worked out that producing commercial quantities of hydrogen is many more years away than first thought.
That is why we would be mad to shut down our coal industry in just 10 years when there will be no replacement for these jobs.
And make no mistake.
It is the Queensland Labor Government that is deciding to shut down our coal industry.
There is no lack of demand for our coal.
In the week that Twiggy’s announcement was made, new statistics came out showing that the world demand for coal reached record levels last year.
In our region alone, there has been an extra 644-terawatt hours of coal power produced since the world signed up to “net zero” in Glasgow two years ago.
A large coal fired power station produces around 10 terawatt hours a year so the equivalent of 64 coal fired power stations have been brought online in the Asia-Pacific region in just 2 years.
This week India has announced that it plans to build 80 gigawatts of coal fired power in the next 8 years.
Unlike demand for hydrogen, demand for coal is surging.
But our Labor Governments are doing nothing to meet this demand and get more jobs and wealth for our state because they are ideologically locked in to seeing the demise of our coal industry.
Make no mistake.
If we do not approve new projects and scare aware investors by constantly saying that the days of coal are over, we can shut down our coal industry. In that case, the coal mining jobs will all go to Indonesia, China and India.
When Prime Minister Albanese visited Gladstone in April, he said that “we have green hydrogen that will be so important in driving clean manufacturing through in the future.” And when asked about coal fired power, he said that it “doesn’t stack up”.
Unfortunately, it is hydrogen that is not stacking up right now, but we have a government that has decided to gamble the economic futures of Central Queensland on it.
