It’s nuts that we’re selling coal overseas while Aussies pay $$$ for energy

Here in Gippsland – and in the rest of Australia for that matter – we have so much coal. There is so much of the stuff we hardly know what to do with it, especially now that the powers that be (no pun intended!) are determined we should go over to the cleaner but vastly more expensive green sources of electricity, like windmills and photo-electric panels.

There is a field of coal in the Latrobe Valley that is said to be 600 metres thick and stretches for 50 kilometres or more across country. What’s more, it is all solid coal, not in narrow seams, as it is in so many mines. It is soft, brown coal, more akin to peat than black anthracite, but it is easy to mine as open pits, with vast diggers the size of a city block eating away at it, sending a steady supply to the nearby power stations along conveyor belts that sometimes run 24 hours a day, dropping the freshly cut coal pretty well straight into the waiting furnaces.

You can well imagine the enormous quantities of coal that have to be dug out, to supply this much fuel, but such is the sheer size of the source that I recall someone telling me that after 60 years of steady digging, only about 2 per cent of what is there has actually been used! The hole that has been dug alongside the power station – it’s Loy Yang, and there are two others as well, in the vicinity – is about 4km long by 2km wide and something like a 300m deep. That’s quite a pile of coal that has been dug out!

Of course, coal-fired power stations like these are being made obsolete and closed down in favour of the other resources, which on the face of it seems extremely sad, when you consider the vast amounts of cheap, easily accessible fuel we have in Latrobe Valley. I wouldn’t have put it beyond the wit of man to have been able to design some sort of filtration system to clean up the fumes from the furnaces before they’re ejected into the surrounding air, something along the lines of the catalytic converters fitted to all cars these days. You can’t help thinking, if you happen to be a bit of a cynic, that there might be more money to be made by someone, from the new ‘green’ methods, than trying a converter — but as I say, only a cynic might think that!

The major irony of the whole situation is the fact that, while we are now using less coal for power generation, to keep the air clean and fresh, we are nonetheless still selling vast quantities of the stuff to China and India to use for – wait for it – power generation! They also use it for smelting iron ore as well, and where do they get the ore from? Us! We eventually by the ore back again, now converted into steel, at a horrendous profit to the sellers, India and China!

If all of this is happening anyway, what is the point? We might just as well process the ore ourselves, it seems to me, which would not only save all that money, but I would be prepared to wager large sums of money, if I had any, on the fact that our people would find a much cleaner and more efficient way to do the job too; an all-round win/win situation for Australia I would have thought. But of course I am no accountant, so I’m sure there must be some major flaw in my argument, or we’d be producing steel here right now, wouldn’t we … Wouldn’t we?

It would seem, all we ordinary people can do is to sit back and hope that our electricity bills will stop growing bigger at such a merry rate. Maybe then we can get back to enjoying and affording living again.

Do you think it would be more beneficial to process coal for Australian industry? What are your thoughts on coal power?

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