Lateline - 23/10/2012: Kimberley to be next resource bonanza:
The Kimberley in the north west of Australia has some of the biggest gas, coal, uranium and bauxite reserves in the world and plans to carve it up are well under way but there are concerns that development will destroy the environment.
Photo Damian Kelly
ACTION OF THE DAY
A MAJOR national bank has been forced to remove more than 100 misleading out of order signs from its ATMs after being targeted by anti-coal activists.
A MAJOR national bank has been forced to remove more than 100 misleading out of order signs from its ATMs after being targeted by anti-coal activists.
A score of ANZ Banking Group machines sprawled across six capital cities were plastered with "out of order" signs on Sunday after campaigners launched their latest bid to draw attention to the bank's funding of the coal industry.
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WAYNE BERGMANN: As traditional owners or concerned citizens we're not being provided with the level of information, projects aren't being scrutinised properly. There should be a moratorium on any further drilling in the Canning Basin until there are clear rules and guidelines in place so that we can be assured that world's best practice is being carried out.
ReplyDeleteMATTHEW CARNEY: Wayne Bergmann has the support from some senior law men of the Kimberley, and they're planning a campaign to resist the resource companies.
JOHN WATSON, TRADITIONAL OWNER, NYIKINA MANGALA: Water is very important for us otherwise we wouldn't be living, you know. I mean we've got a story to this country we're trying to protect.
WAYNE BERGMANN: Through the Kimberley Land Council we're calling a large bush meeting of the five or six traditional owner groups that are predominantly impacted by this. We're going to all stand together and talk up with one voice to ensure these companies don't steamroll us.
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Big fat Wayne trying to position himself for the next corrupt money extravaganza - for him and his buddies of course.
The only reason this mob like him is all he ever talks about is money money money.
As for Dodson he never says anything coherent,it all disappears into his beard.
And it's not hundreds of wells - it's thousands.
The only difference between Noonkanbah and Walmadan is no money was on the table for Noonkanbah.Don't expect much from this mob.
And as usual the poorest people will be rattled around inside the tin cup once again as the exscuse for the fat cats to get to the money.And as usual the poorest ones will never see any benefit from it.We are all the same species alright no mistake there.
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BUT THE ONE THING IN OUR FAVOUR IS WE ARE FAR BEHIND EVERYONE ELSE.
The main "hotspots" are listed as:
1) East Africa
The potential in East Africa is now well documented, with huge gas finds off Mozambique earlier this year. Everyone is positioning themselves for opportunities in Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique.
2) Myanmar
Many see this as the last South East Asian frontier with huge potential.
3) Malawi
New finds indicate their is a lot of untapped potential here, and the majors are jostling for position.
Other ones that come up are Kurdistan, Lebanon, Cyprus, Israel.
In all of these places, Oil and Gas companies are itching to know the latest regulatory reforms, the oil and gas fiscal regime (e.g. Production Sharing Contract) and tax structure updates
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For now our very high wages and costs will protect us.But like the tide comming in every wave gets a little closer.
Former WorleyParsons chief executive John Grill says Australian wage demands are 50% higher than anywhere else in the world due to a crippling labour shortage.
DeleteSpeaking to Inside Business yesterday, he said the slew of LNG projects in the pipeline was adding pressure to an already stretched labour market.
“It is very easy to determine that Australian wages are much higher,” he said.
“Our wages for engineers would be 50 per cent higher than they are in any of our offices anywhere else in the world.”
He also said the higher exchange rate of the Australian dollar was having an impact.
“I think the exchange rate has had a big effect as well. The fact that certainly when the dollar was 72c Australia was definitely more competitive,” Grill said.
“We were still certainly in engineering amongst the more expensive places in the world.”
He also refused to be drawn to answer whether LNG exports from mainland US would happen but said exports from Alaska would “definitely” happen.
They complain about red tape and green tape,wages,delays,costs - you name it.
ReplyDeleteBut what about this TO - he only wanted to grow a crop on his own country.
It took him 10 years to battle the governments who wanted to stop him.
http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/wa/15238018/traditional-owners-sow-seeds-of-success/
As the sun rises over his expansive Murchison station and the birds begin their song, proud indigenous man William Mallard gets a moment alone to contemplate how far he has come.
After a decade of landmark legal and bureaucratic wrangling to return his picturesque Mid West station to its traditional owners and enable his family to embark on a cropping venture, the 49-year-old is set to harvest his first wheat crop.
It is believed to be the first time an indigenous family in WA have convinced the Federal Government's Indigenous Land Corporation to lift a restrictive caveat on their property which would not allow them to obtain a mortgage for a cropping venture.
Mt View Station, near Northampton, was acquired by the ILC and transferred to the Mallard family as the traditional owners in 2002. Ten years on, the family will finally harvest their first wheat crop after years of work to prove they can make a viable business of their farm.
Mr Mallard was desperate to make the property financially successful and he and his father Bill spent the best part of the past decade working with the Department of Agriculture's Indigenous Landholder Service to lobby the ILC to remove the caveat.
It was a process fraught with stress and exhaustion but Mr Mallard was keen to break the welfare cycle and create a solid business for his extended family.
QUEENSLAND Premier Campbell Newman has been forced to deny that his government is seeking to open up national parks for resource development after an internal memo from the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service was leaked to media.
ReplyDelete*
the department needed to address “our responsiveness to ‘industry’ and their access to state land for resource use and activities (e.g. coal seam gas and mining).”
“To implement this agenda, we must all think in the first instance about how, within our delegations, we can support and allow an activity to happen, rather than reasons it can’t.
“We must work to break down perceptions that we are preventing access and locking up the land we manage.”
The letter fuelled speculation from several quarters, including the Lock the Gate Alliance, that the government was putting pressure on the department to open up national parks for exploration and development.
“This document makes it clear the Newman Government is considering allowing high-impact extractive activities in our national parks, marine parks and other beautiful natural areas,” Alliance president Drew Hutton said.
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A REVIEW of pilotage operations in the Great Barrier Reef and Torres Strait has turned up some worrying findings.
The area will be of increasing importance as the LNG export terminals on Curtis Island comes into operation.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s review found that under the coastal pilotage regulations, no organisation, including the pilotage provider companies, had clear responsibility for managing safety risks associated with operations.
It also identified systemic safety issues surrounding pilot training, fatigue management, incident reporting, competency assessment and use of coastal vessel traffic services.
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The ATSB began an investigation into coastal pilotage operations in 2010 after the release of its report into the grounding of the piloted tanker Atlantic Blue in the Torres Strait.
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Armour Energy has wrapped up native title agreements with the Wanyi, Garawa and Gangalidda people of the Carpentaria basin in Northern Queensland over ATP 1087.
The native title agreement is a further step in securing the permit, with Armour telling the market that it hoped to start exploration in April to coincide with the start of the dry season.
MBA Petroleum Consultants have put the potential resource of the permit at a mean technically recoverable resource of 22.5 trillion cubic feet of gas and 242 million barrels of associated liquids.
Armour is also seeking permits in surrounding areas and told the market that it was already looking into commercialisation options.
The looming domination of floating LNG developments over the traditional land-based processing option received a big fillip yesterday when the Federal Government approved plans by Santos and GDF Suez for their Bonaparte project.
ReplyDeleteEnvironment Minister Tony Burke’s conditional sign-off of the Bonaparte FLNG joint venture is the second such approval in Australia’s history, following the nod for Royal Dutch Shell’s Prelude development two years ago.
Santos and its French partner are targeting a final investment decision by late 2014 before embarking on a four-year construction period.
Their project is based on gas fields in the Joseph Bonaparte Basin 250km west of Darwin.
The emergence of FLNG, led by Shell’s industry-leading technology, has sparked a rush of new proposals as proponents try to come up with development options that avoid WA’s high-cost construction and operating environment as well as high-profile protests from green groups.
But the offshore rush will also have a huge impact on job opportunities in the State.
THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO WILL MISS OUT ARE THE TENS OF THOUSANDS OF OVERSEAS WORKERS THEY WERE PLANNING TO BRING IN.THEY WOULD HAVE STRUGGLED TO FIND ENOUGH SKILLED WORKERS ANYWAY,AS THIS GAS RUSH IS NOW CAUSING WORLDWIDE SHORTAGES.
the future of oil is gas, because:
DeleteGas reserves in the earth’s crust far outweigh oil reserves.
Liquids were the low-hanging fruit of the petroleum world, but have been “over-plucked”, limiting the potential for future production expansion.
Liquefaction technology has elevated LNG into an essential component of the global energy trade.
Deepwater drilling and floating production technology is opening the high seas to LNG developments, just as shale gas and coal seam gas boost onshore gas output, and
Major energy-consuming countries are keen to snap the nexus which hamstrings their economies to unstable Middle East oil flows.
Last week provided a number of examples of how the world is embracing an expanding gas future in preference to a future controlled by declining levels of liquid oil production.
In Australia, a second LNG floating production project won government approval, with the French-led GDF Suez project expected to make a final investment decision on the aptly named Bonaparte project in 2014.
The 2 million tonne per annum development will follow the Prelude/Concerto “floater” of Royal Dutch Shell, and will possibly be followed by a string of other LNG floaters which will supersede some conventional LNG projects and enable developers to bypass Australia’s high domestic cost environment.
In Tokyo, Japanese power utilities are reportedly seeking a change to the way LNG is traded, with greater flexibility in contracts and pricing which could eventually see seaborne gas as freely exchanged as seaborne oil.
In Singapore, work is steaming ahead on a major new LNG receiving terminal near the Jurong industrial estate, with the island nation keen to secure an additional energy source which reduces its reliance on pipelined gas from Indonesia and Malaysia.
Collectively, the flow of shale gas, the start of a floating LNG production industry, and the push for flexible LNG trading add to a picture of a world rushing towards a gas future.
The giant Dragon that is supposed to eat all this bonanza appears to have a severe case of indigestion.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.marketwatch.com/story/china-firms-leave-bills-unpaid-as-economy-slows-2012-10-28?mod=theaustraliantopstoriesnews&reflink=theaustralian
BEIJING ( Caixin Online ) — Tight credit and a weak business climate are forcing Chinese companies to neglect their bills, resulting in a surge in many businesses’ accounts receivable.
Accounts receivable refers to money owed but not yet collected from a company’s clients.
Enterprises are struggling to pay suppliers on time, adding to the financial strain felt by the suppliers, which in turn find it hard or impossible to repay their creditors.
As of August, combined net receivables for the nation’s industrial companies totaled nearly 8 trillion yuan ($1.28 trillion), up 15.6% from August 2011, outpacing the companies’ average operating revenue growth by 5.4 percentage points, data from the National Bureau of Statistics shows.
Most enterprises blame their liquidity pinch on difficulties recalling operating loans, said Song Hong, head of the department of international trade under Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Song recently visited many enterprises in cities including Shenzhen; Suzhou, in the east’s Jiangsu Province; and Chengdu, in the southwestern province of Sichuan. From buying raw materials to marketing products, he said, any link that normally does not easily run into problems where there is delay may trigger serious issues when the economy is in a slowdown.
Coal mining, steel and machinery manufacturing enterprises have been hardest hit.
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The China Iron & Steel Association (CISA) said steel companies across the nation are under liquidity pressure and having a hard time collecting money owed by clients.
By the end of July, the amount of net receivables and net payables of the 81 steel companies monitored by CISA was, respectively, 119 billion yuan /quotes/zigman/4869230/sampled USDCNY +0.0415% and 407 billion yuan, up 17.8% and 10.6% from the same month last year.
Coal companies saw a greater surge in receivables. By July 31, 90 enterprises monitored by China National Coal Association, reported combined net receivables of nearly 195 billion yuan, an increase of 48.7% from the same day a year earlier.
Nationwide receivables for machinery manufacturing companies also rose year on year by 16.9% to 2.5 trillion yuan at the end of July, data from China Machinery Industry Federation (CMIF) showed. The pace was far quicker than the average growth rate of 9.6% for operating revenues in the industry, CMIF says.
Chain reaction
Experts say this is partly due to the slowdown in infrastructure building. The head of the Liaoning Steel Circulation Association, who did not give him name, said primary contractors of projects such as the building of highways and high-speed railways defaulted most on operating loans to steel-supplying companies monitored by the institution.
Also affected are many export-driven industries, such as textile production and trading. Dragged by weak foreign demand, sales have been low and many textile companies have failed to recoup enough cash to pay for their supplies.
Details on the long-awaited Albany gas pipeline extension are expected to be released today as part of the Western Australian Government's visit to the south coast.
ReplyDeleteThe Government initially pledged to extend the Dampier to Bunbury pipeline to Albany in its first term but later conceded that would not happen.
It says it remains committed to the expected $450 million extension to bring natural gas to the Great Southern as a second-term project.
It is expected more about the project will be revealed today.
The Government's full Cabinet will meet in Albany this morning.
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WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court is staying out of the fight over efforts by Amazon rain forest residents to collect more than $18 billion from Chevron Corp. for environmental damage in Ecuador.
The court said Tuesday it will not consider Chevron's request to prevent the plaintiffs from trying to collect the judgment they won in an Ecuadorean court in February 2011. Chevron says there was massive fraud in the legal proceedings in Ecuador.
The justices' order, issued without comment, is the latest step in nearly two decades of litigation that stemmed from the poisoning of land in the Ecuadorean rainforest while the oil company Texaco was operating an oil consortium from 1972 to 1990 in the Amazon. Texaco became a wholly owned subsidiary of Chevron in 2001.