Last month the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, urged the private sector to build a gas-fired power station on the old aluminium smelter site at Loxford near Kurri Kurri. Otherwise, he said, the government-owned Snowy Hydro will step in and do the job. Labor MP for Hunter, Joel Fitzgibbon, welcomed the announcement.
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A fortnight ago the NSW government's Independent Planning Commission, gave the go ahead to the Santos gas extraction project at Narrabri. Mr Fitzgibbon duly welcomed the announcement.
A week ago the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, announced measures to accelerate extraction in five Australian gas fields. I'm guessing Mr Fitzgibbon would give this a big tick.
Gas, it seems, is the new black, and poor old coal is losing its gloss. Some say gas-fired power stations can plug an electricity gap on a 40-degree day when air conditioners are flat out. Others say these power stations can provide interim baseload power during the transition from coal-fired power stations to renewables. Wild optimists claim cheap gas can fuel a revival in Australian manufacturing. The arguments are mixed, complicated, contradictory. Time will expose them.
What is clear right now, though, is that in the 21st century economy gas belts coal out of the park. New York academic Timothy Mitchell tells why in his book Carbon Democracy. In the book Mitchell explains how the simple fluidity of gas and petroleum systematically annihilated coal as an energy source in Europe and then America, commencing from the 1970s.
Coal always had problems. The Hunter knows the story. Mining is dangerous, dust brings lung disease to miners and to householders in local communities. Burning coal for electricity is equally fraught.
Phillip O'Neill: Gas and the Hunter
But coal's major economic drawback, says Mitchell, is that it gives organised labour considerable leverage along the coal supply chain. Again, the Hunter knows the story intimately. Underground, miners are freed from management oversight. Above ground, workers' control over coal stockpiles can send mine owners into a spin as customers scream for fuel. Similarly, workers at washeries, along railways, at ports, and in power station furnaces have genuine industrial muscle.
Gas, like petroleum beforehand, wipes away these junctions of power.
The Santos project at Narrabri is a good example. There will be no workers underground. Above ground engineers will control the injection of water and sand into coal seams to release the methane gas. Largely automated purification processes will strip carbon dioxide and the gas will flow under pressure through a straight-forward, buried pipeline to Sydney, perhaps via Loxford. There, if Mr Morrison's hopes are realised, the gas will flow into a furnace and be burned to generate up to 1000 megawatts of electricity.
Timothy Mitchell's book tells similar stories for the way pipelines across Europe and northern Africa slashed jobs and crushed organised labour across the coal industry in those parts of the world.
Which makes me confused about Mr Fitzgibbon's embrace of gas. The Narrabri project will generate 200 operating jobs, merely one for every four extraction wells, the equivalent two jobs for every patch of drilling country the size of Kotara mall and its car parks. Then, a 1000MW gas-fired power station at Loxford would require only 30 workers, based on similar plants in the US, about half the number of workers in a small-sized Maccas.
Mr Fitzgibbon tells us there is no need to worry about the emissions from the Hunter's coal-burning power stations, that their contribution to global emissions is insignificant, an assertion I disagree with, to be clear.
But if Mr Fitzgibbon is correct, why is he undermining the 1500 jobs in the Hunter's and Central Coast's coal-fired electricity sector?
Generating electricity from locally-mined coal creates more than ten times the jobs that might come from a gas-fired alternative. And signing on to gas, as Timothy Mitchell explains, means smashing union power - and so good wages and conditions evaporate.
No one expects the Hunter's transition out of coal to be simple.
There is much to suggest, though, that turning on the gas pipeline is not just a pause to the inevitable shift to renewables. It may well be making the transition out of coal more difficult, more expensive and, worryingly, more harmful to the workers of the Hunter.
Phillip O'Neill is professor of economic geography at Western Sydney University
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