Post #1799160

2/2 “Long story short,” says Bourne, “there’s oil in the ground, but by and large, it is commercially not viable.” Even if it were, it would take a long time to bring into production and would not insulate Australia from oil shocks such as we are currently experiencing. The war is causing fuel price spikes in countries with big oil reserves as well. The US is the world’s largest producer of oil and one of the three biggest exporters, along with Saudi Arabia and Russia. It also has enormous refining capacity. Yet in the month after the start of the war with Iran, US petrol prices went up 31 per cent and diesel prices rose 41 per cent. That, says Bourne, is because oil is a globally traded commodity. “It’s like gold,” he says. “The gold price is set by supply and demand, and it is the same price everywhere in the world on that particular day. Same with silver, same with platinum and other global commodities. Same with oil.” Not only does Australia not have much in the way of proven oil reserves, he says, it also lacks refining capacity. Increasing that capacity is financially unfeasible. He cites the example of Western Australia’s Kwinana refinery, which was Australia’s biggest before its closure in 2021. Kwinana’s maximum throughput in its life was 140,000 barrels a day, he says, and when it was built, in the mid 1950s, “places like Singapore and Indonesia didn’t have big refineries. “Now Singapore and Indonesia have refineries 10 times bigger than Kwinana was. The economies of scale meant you could not ship a tanker-load of crude to Kwinana, refine and distribute it in Australia at a price to compete.” The same story goes for all six of Australia’s eight refineries that have closed this century. The two that continue to operate, Bourne says, only do so because they are heavily subsidised by the federal government – as would inevitably be the case if new refining capacity were built. Apart from the cost, it would take at least five years, optimistically, to get new refining capacity up and running. Bourne gives me a potted history of the oil age, from the 1860s, through to the rise of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries – founded in 1960 in Baghdad, with five initial members: Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. OPEC now has grown to include 12 core members, which sit on about 80 per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves. Bourne rattles off the various oil shocks from the 1970s to date, to underline the point that OPEC, and in particular the petrostates of the Middle East, have enormous geopolitical power, and a history of wielding that power ruthlessly. Whatever the final outcome of this most recent period of instability, he says, it is a “certainty that going forward there will be another oil shock and another oil shock and another oil shock” for as long as the world remains dependent on oil. “And so basically, the smart money is going to go into electric vehicles, batteries, smarter grids.” Recent events have shown that one side of politics in Australia is at least somewhat cognisant of that reality. The other is not. In Angus Taylor, says Bourne, we have an opposition leader who simply parrots a variation of the Trump mantra: “Drill, baby, drill.” Instead, Bourne argues, Australia should look at what is happening in China where “the electric car fleet is massive, and their electric truck fleet is massive, and their bus fleet is massive”. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Angus, embrace the future. Stop hugging the past.” #AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead #ClimateCrisis #NonLinear #TippingPoints #PositiveFeedbackLoops #FossilFools #RenewableEnergy #ChangeTheSystem #StateCapture #RightToProtest #Biodiversity #WeAreTotallyFscked #Misanthropy #Karma #NativeForests #StopLoggingNativeForests #FsckCapitalism #CognitiveDissonance