(Of which some notice has been given)Thursday, 11 April 2013
Hon Robin Chapple to the Leader of the House representing the Minister for State Development
With regard to the receipt of royalties from off-shore gas reserves I ask:
(1) Are there any royalties due to WA from development of the Browse Basin gas reserves?
(2) If yes to (1), what is the dollar value of such royalties if these gas reserves are processed on-shore?
(3) If yes to (1), what is the dollar value of such royalties if these gas reserves are processed off-shore?
(4) If no to (1), are there any royalties due to the Commonwealth, and if so what is the financial benefit to WA from the administration of such royalties?
I thank the Hon. Member for some notice of this question.
(1) Royalties will be payable to Western Australia from the development of Browse Basin gas contained within State Waters.
(2-3) The State royalty is normally set at between 10-12.5 per cent of the wellhead value of petroleum produced. The wellhead value of petroleum recovered is calculated by deducting, from the arm's length gross value of the petroleum, post-wellhead costs as agreed or determined. Consequently, the exact dollar amount is difficult to determine as it will depend on when, and the rate at which, these reserves are developed and the prevailing value of the gas at the time.
(4) Not applicable
Hon Robin Chapple to the Leader of the House representing the Minister for State Development
With regard to the receipt of royalties from off-shore gas reserves I ask:
(1) Are there any royalties due to WA from development of the Browse Basin gas reserves?
(2) If yes to (1), what is the dollar value of such royalties if these gas reserves are processed on-shore?
(3) If yes to (1), what is the dollar value of such royalties if these gas reserves are processed off-shore?
(4) If no to (1), are there any royalties due to the Commonwealth, and if so what is the financial benefit to WA from the administration of such royalties?
I thank the Hon. Member for some notice of this question.
(1) Royalties will be payable to Western Australia from the development of Browse Basin gas contained within State Waters.
(2-3) The State royalty is normally set at between 10-12.5 per cent of the wellhead value of petroleum produced. The wellhead value of petroleum recovered is calculated by deducting, from the arm's length gross value of the petroleum, post-wellhead costs as agreed or determined. Consequently, the exact dollar amount is difficult to determine as it will depend on when, and the rate at which, these reserves are developed and the prevailing value of the gas at the time.
(4) Not applicable
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The Fossil Fuel Resistance
ReplyDeleteAs the world burns, a new movement to reverse climate change is emerging - fiercely, loudly and right next door
By Bill McKibben
April 11, 2013 8:00 AM ET
It got so hot in Australia in January that the weather service had to add two new colors to its charts. A few weeks later, at the other end of the planet, new data from the CryoSat-2 satellite showed 80 percent of Arctic sea ice has disappeared. We're not breaking records anymore; we're breaking the planet. In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They'll just ask, "So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?"
Here's the good news: We'll at least be able to say we fought.
After decades of scant organized response to climate change, a powerful movement is quickly emerging around the country and around the world, building on the work of scattered front-line organizers who've been fighting the fossil-fuel industry for decades. It has no great charismatic leader and no central organization; it battles on a thousand fronts. But taken together, it's now big enough to matter, and it's growing fast.
The Fossil Fuel Resistance: Meet the New Green Heroes
Americans got to see some of this movement spread out across the Mall in Washington, D.C., on a bitter-cold day in February. Press accounts put the crowd upward of 40,000 – by far the largest climate rally in the country's history. They were there to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, which would run down from Canada's tar sands, south to the Gulf of Mexico, a fight that Time magazine recently referred to as the Selma and the Stonewall of the environmental movement. But there were thousands in the crowd also working to block fracking wells across the Appalachians and proposed Pacific coast deep-water ports that would send coal to China. Students from most of the 323 campuses where the fight for fossil-fuel divestment is under way mingled with veterans of the battles to shut down mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia and Kentucky, and with earnest members of the Citizens Climate Lobby there to demand that Congress enact a serious price on carbon. A few days earlier, 48 leaders had been arrested outside the White House – they included ranchers from Nebraska who didn't want a giant pipeline across their land and leaders from Texas refinery towns who didn't want more crude spilling into their communities. Legendary investor Jeremy Grantham was on hand, urging scientists to accompany their research with civil disobedience, as were solar entrepreneurs quickly figuring out how to deploy panels on rooftops across the country. The original Americans were well-represented; indigenous groups are core leaders of the fight, since their communities have been devastated by mines and cheated by oil companies. The Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. of the Hip Hop Caucus was handcuffed next to Julian Bond, former head of the NAACP, who recounted stories of being arrested for integrating Atlanta lunch counters in the Sixties.
It's a sprawling, diverse and remarkably united movement, marked by its active opposition to the richest and most powerful industry on Earth. The Fossil Fuel Resistance has already won some serious victories, blocking dozens of new coal plants and closing down existing ones – ask the folks at Little Village Environmental Justice Organization who helped shutter a pair of coal plants in Chicago, or the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, which fought to stop Chevron from expanding its refinery in Richmond, California.
These are serious people: You're not a member of the Resistance just because you drive a Prius. You don't need to go to jail, but you do need to do more than change your light bulbs. You need to try to change the system that is raising the temperature, the sea level, the extinction rate – even raising the question of how well civilization will survive this century.
cont...
ReplyDeleteNow, energized by the Keystone protests, some strides have been made. The NRDC has done yeoman's work against the pipeline. The Sierra Club, which just a few years ago was taking millions from the fracking industry to shill for natural gas, has been reinvented. In January, the club dropped a 120-year ban on civil disobedience. The following month, its executive director, Michael Brune, was led away from the White House in handcuffs.
But the center of gravity has also shifted from big, established groups to local, distributed efforts. In the Internet age, you don't need direct mail and big headquarters; you need Twitter. In Texas and Oklahoma, hundreds have joined actions led by the Tar Sands Blockade, which has used daredevil tactics and lots of courage to get between the industry and the pipeline it needs to move oil overseas. In Montana, author Rick Bass and others sat-in to stop the export of millions of tons of coal from ports on the West Coast. And all across the Marcellus and Utica shale formations in the Northeast, people have been standing up for their communities, often by sitting down in front of the fracking industry. The Fossil Fuel Resistance looks more and more like Occupy – in fact, they've overlapped from the beginning, since oil companies are the one percent of the one percent. The movements share a political analysis, too: A grid with a million solar rooftops feels more like the Internet than ConEd; it's a farmers market in electrons, with the local control that it implies.
Only grit and hard work. We've watched great cultural shifts and organizing successes in recent years, like the marriage-equality and immigration-reform movements. But breaking the power of oil companies may be even harder because the sums of the money on the other side are so fantastic – there are trillions of dollars worth of oil in Canada's tar sands and the North Dakota shale. The men who own the coal mines and the gas wells will spend what they need to assure their victories. Last month, Rex Tillerson, Exxon's $100,000-a-day CEO, said that environmentalists were "obtuse" for opposing new pipelines. He announced the company planned to more than double the acreage on which it was exploring for new hydrocarbons and said he expected that renewables would account for just one percent of our energy in 2040, essentially declaring that the war to save the climate was over before it started. He added, "My philosophy is to make money."
That same day, scientists announced that Earth was now warming 50 times faster than it ever has in human civilization, and that carbon-dioxide levels had set a perilous new record at Mauna Loa's measuring station. Right now, we're losing. But as the planet runs its spiking fever, the antibodies are starting to kick in. We know what the future holds unless we resist. And so resist we will.
This story is from the April 25th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.
Full story at : http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-fossil-fuel-resistance-20130411