10 Years After Queensland's Right-Wing Government Trumpeted Coal "Boom", 1 Mine Has Opened
Queensland’s huge untapped Galilee coal basin was touted as a jobs and revenue bonanza by its supporters, with the potential to liberate hundreds of millions of tonnes of harmful greenhouse gases. The Galilee’s potential as a “carbon bomb” was wrapped up in a dozen or more coalmining projects and estimates of billions of dollars of investment.
So far, just one project has made it through the starting gate – Adani’s controversial Carmichael mine, which sent its first coal to port late last year. The mine was supposed to be the first of many. Yet there is little sign of more coal to come, with many projects shelved, lapsed or discontinued, and uncertain futures for those that remain.
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Earlier reports from environment groups and others identified nine of those projects as “megamines” which, if they gained approvals and were at full production, would produce 330m tonnes of coal a year. When burned, all that coal would emit 857m tonnes of CO2 a year, according to a report from Climate Analytics. But slowly the projects – and the jobs claims – have fallen away.
The Degulla mine had an estimated 35m tonnes of coal a year waiting to be dug. But in 2013 its Brazil-based owner Vale, one of the world’s biggest miners, put the project on the market. Vale announced last year it was getting out of coal altogether and told the Guardian this week it still has “exploration tenements in the [Galilee] region that are in [the] process of divestment”. The Chinese-owned Macmines Austasia abandoned its bid for a mining lease for its $6.7bn China Stone mine in 2019. A state environmental assessment for another mine, the South Galilee Coal project, lapsed in late 2019. The project’s part-owner had already gone into administration and there’s little sign of action from the mine’s American investor.
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jan/09/after-adani-whatever-happened-to-queenslands-galilee-basin-coal-boom
