Political Pressure on Coal Down Stream Industry Faulters

[rob52]

Well I was given a copy of this to read....

Big Coal: Australia's Dirtiest Habit
Guy Pearse David McKnight Bob Burton
Paperback, University of New South Wales Press
272 Pgs
isbn-10: 1742233031, isbn-13: 9781742233031

There is a bit about it on the WEB.

SMH Article

"
it's time Australians thought much more about coal. Our future is increasingly tied up in it. About 75 per cent of our electricity is from coal-fired plants. Australian coal exports constitute one-third of the world's seaborne coal trade. This increasingly feeds the power plants and steel mills of India and China, both responsible for much of the increasing global greenhouse emissions. Because climate change is global, the consequences of burning coal in Mumbai or Shanghai are the same as burning it in Victoria. That is why it is important to take a critical look at Australian coal exports, as well as the domestic burning of coal.
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There are two additional reasons why our coal exports are a problem. First, there is a significant degree of hypocrisy in Australia, where the use of green energy is encouraged at home while huge profits are made from exporting dirty coal. The greenhouse emissions from our coal exports nullify any planned emission reductions within Australia, many times over.

Our sea water is 30 per cent more acidic than in pre-industrial times.

The coalmining industry is about 80 per cent foreign-owned, according to the Reserve Bank, and therefore most profits eventually go offshore. The industry claims that much is spent on employing people. In reality, the coal workforce of about 50,000 is a tiny part of an Australian workforce of more than 11 million.

this contributes to a "two-speed" economy that disadvantages the majority of Australians who do not work or directly benefit from mining.

But the most radical consequences of our expansion of coalmining are yet to come. The need to prevent this was summed up by the former head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, who endorsed our book. "Kicking Australia's coal habit is the greatest gift Australians could give to everybody's children, future generations and other life on the planet," he said.


David McKnight is a research fellow at the University of NSW and co-author of Big Coal: Australia's Dirtiest Habit. His co-authors are Guy Pearse and Bob Burton.
"

50,000 direct mining employees maybe....they seem to have conveniently forgotten that there are a lot of down stream industries......splutter.....cough...oh sorry I forgot the down stream industries have moved to China & India where labour works for $15 per month.

Onesteel/Arrium appears sunk
Arrium Debt Burden

=>> "Arrium owes more than $2 billion to a syndicate of 20 lenders, including the big four Australian banks, but has been crippled by a drop in the prices of iron ore and steel."
So is that it for Steel Manufacture in Australia??....Newcastle BOS capability gone, BOS & rolling mills parked up at Port Kembla, Wyalla?
....."Shares in Arrium last traded at 2c each"....the vultures are circling to pick over the carcus.

& No Ford, No Holden etc

Meh...Australia just becomes the quarry for the world....with an aging population on Superannuation Benefits paying no tax and receiving their 30% franking credits on fully franked dividends as set up by John Howard...ridiculous really.

Rob

[dazbt]

A bit of a surprise to learn that 80% of the Aussie coal industry is foreign owned .............. for some members at least!

[rob52]

The Mineral Council’s/Coal industry on the PR trail...
The Wonderful Little Black Rock
$6B in wages
$40B injection to the economy per yr

Others have a different view
Scorn Response 1
Scorn Response 2

....so on it rolls

Rob

[rob52]

They are lining up on the wagon at the University of Hertfordshire UK Links

Wonder if they are affiliated with the "green huggers"?

Rob

[rob52]

June 18, 2015 6.19am AEST - The facts on Australian coal production

ABC 4 Corners - Monday 15th June 2015 The End of Coal?

Tuesday 29 September 2015 Discussion

& now the
price per ton

Projection
is on the way back up.


Coal V's Uranium

The Critical List: 91 Coal Projects 2014

Felton

********
The Monthly - October 2015

“
abuzz with the terms PM10 and PM2.5. They refer to the particulate matter (up to 10 or 2.5 micrometres in size) produced by the burning of fossil fuel, especially coal, diesel and heavy oil. These particles, also abundant near mines and coal-handling operations, are many times smaller than the width of a human hair, and can enter the bloodstream and cause cancer. China’s double-digit economic growth over the past decade has been driven by coal-fired heavy industry, and this has made air pollution so bad that the central government has responded by declaring a “war on pollution”, with a primary focus on thermal coal. In 2012, the central government began measuring levels of PM2.5, which are considered more dangerous than PM10, and the results have been astonishing. In 2013, PM2.5 levels in Beijing reached 900 micrograms per cubic metre; the World Health Organization considers the safe daily level to be 25. The priority given to reducing pollution was so great that Chinese premier Li Keqiang likened it to the fight against poverty over previous decades. A key part of the strategy, he said, involved changing “the way energy is consumed and produced”.

China burns a mammoth amount of coal – far more than any other country. With 2836 million tonnes consumed in 2014, China’s demand alone represented 50% of all the coal burnt in the world. In a single month, the country burns the equivalent of all of Australia’s annual exports of thermal coal. Over the past decade, China’s growth has been greatly dependent on imported coal. Its imports rose from around 50 million tonnes in 2007 to more than 300 million tonnes in 2013. But they peaked in 2014, and have since fallen.

“The Chinese government needs to grow energy production to stay in power, but they need to solve the pollution problem … China is now anything-but-coal. It has a massive install of hydro, wind, solar, gas, plus energy efficiency. It’s adding 20 gigawatts a year each of wind and hydro. Coal is therefore, by definition, a residual. In 2014 it generated 72% of China’s power, but by 2020 [we forecast] this will drop to 59%, even though the economy is still growing strongly.”

This shift may not happen fast enough to substantially reduce China’s coal burning any time soon, given the considerable demand for energy from the country’s growing middle class.

whether total consumption falls rapidly or not, the growth of Chinese domestic production over the past three decades has affected its imports of coal. The Australian federal government’s Office of the Chief Economist (OCE) notes in its latest quarterly brief that China’s imports of thermal coal declined by 32% to 54 million tonnes in the first four months of 2015. This reflected not just efforts to transition out of coal and increased local production but also the slowing of the economy in late 2014 and early 2015.

Australia’s coal output is divided almost equally between thermal coal, which is used for power generation, and coking coal, which is essential for making steel. Any analysis of coal should distinguish between these very different commodities, given that much of the recent debate about the end of coal is really about thermal coal.

In 2014 Australia produced 248 million tonnes of thermal coal; 53 million tonnes were used in local power stations, leaving 195 million tonnes for the export market. This was worth 20% of the world trade, earning around $17 billion in revenue. Thermal coal prices are now plumbing US$50 a tonne, compared to a 2012 peak of around US$150 a tonne.

As for coking coal, Australia produced and exported 186 million tonnes in 2014, accounting for 60% of the global trade in coking coal. Prices for coking coal are considerably higher than those for thermal coal, and this smaller volume of exports earned $23 billion in export income. Although coking-coal prices have fallen much further, from a high of US$350 a tonne in 2011 to around US$80–90 a tonne at present, the current level of prices is still more than double the five-year average from 1999 to 2004, before the mining boom got underway. This might best explain why coal companies are especially keen to push ahead with coking-coal projects in Australia. The prospect of another price surge, perhaps driven by Indian demand, would make them spectacularly profitable.

The intensive use of steel is one of the more reliable trends to emerge from the process of industrialisation. Steel is a basic input in the goods manufactured by heavy industry in emerging economies, and it is also needed to build the cities – especially for roads and high-rise buildings – that mushroom around industrial centres. Steel-making requires a great deal of coal, about 800 kilograms for every tonne of steel. Data from the 1850s onwards shows that when every major economy has industrialised, the amount of steel consumed relative to the size of the economy has risen sharply before peaking and then falling away as the country developed a services sector. This happened in the US from the late 1800s onwards and in Japan after World War Two. And it has been happening in China over the past 20 years. It took a decade for China’s steel output to rise from 50 million tonnes a year to 100 million tonnes, which it reached in 1995. From 2005, China’s steel production began increasing by 100 million tonnes every 18 to 24 months, before peaking at 820 million tonnes in 2013.

India’s steel production is almost exactly one-tenth of China’s, at 83 million tonnes. India’s rise as an industrial power has really only just begun, which is why some analysts in the resource industry believe that the so-called resource super-cycle could span decades. This was the thinking within Australia’s federal treasury before the global financial crisis. According to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, officials believed that the rise in Australia’s terms of trade could be considered “permanent”.

While China’s demand for imported coking coal fell 17% last year and our government forecasts a further 44% fall this year to 45 million tonnes, India’s demand rose 17% and 18% in each of the past two years, reaching 50 million tonnes in 2014. In fact, India’s imports of coking coal matched those of Japan’s exactly that year, each with 50.7 million tonnes.

When it comes to power generation, however, India tells a very different story. It has the technology and the political will to boost renewable energy generation and end its dependency on imported thermal coal. India plans to address the energy needs of more than 300 million impoverished people and its growing middle class by leapfrogging the century-old, coal-fired power grid and moving directly into locally generated clean energy. Its total power generation is about one-fifth that of China’s, with 60% of it generated through coal. But the government plans to boost renewable energy supply at a cost of US$250 billion by 2022, according to a recent IEEFA report. This involves a tenfold increase in solar generation to 100 gigawatts and a fivefold increase in wind generation to 60 gigawatts, plus biomass and small-scale hydro projects. Last May, India’s energy minister, Piyush Goyal, said he is so confident that these reforms will work that “in the next year or two, we will be able to stop imports of thermal coal”.

India’s strategy is being driven by the realisation that the country has the capacity to develop without following China’s initial path of being massively dependent on imported coal. Even the Indian power giant Adani, behind one of the two mega mines in Queensland’s Galilee Basin, says that future energy will come from domestic coal and renewable energy, not imported coal.

Australia also has other export competition now. Indonesia is one example: 15 years ago it exported just 50 million tonnes of coal compared to Australia’s 200 million tonnes, but it now exports 420 million tonnes of coal a year, making it the biggest exporter in the world.

the future of Australia’s coal industry often hinges on views about whether the recent price slump represents a temporary cyclical slowdown or a long-term structural shift. …… the industry will most likely be battered by both trends.
“
*********
February 2017
"Mineral resource development in the Hunter Valley has brought out the best and worst on both sides."...."The Hunter valley continues to be one place in Australia where the collision between mining and other visions of economic development plays out in a very public way. "



Rob