Energy – coal
Australia is enormously dependent on coal for income. It represents 20% of our exports.
And some of our other exports are things like tourism and education foreign students – these are vulnerable to high oil prices and the high Australian dollar.
So we are really locked in as a nation to coal.
What most of us probably don’t realise is how recent a phenomenon this is. And it could have gone quite differently except for a few men.
How much do you know about our history as a coal-exporting nation? Not much probably. I certainly didn’t.
Well here are a few points about it:
Our rise as a major coal exporter is recent and rapid.
Australia is the world’s largest coal exporter. We export 260 million tonnes of coal a year. We export 64% of the world’s metallurgical coaland 19% of thermal coal.
Our coal goes to Japan (48.7% of thermal and 35.7% of metallurgical) then South Korea Taiwan Chinaand India.
Remember when we used to say that Australia rode on the sheep’s back. In those days Australia only exported 2 million tonnes of coal a year mostly to New Zealand.
A man called Jack Crawford whose origins were in Scotland gave him familiarity with coal technology and a few other like minded thinkers joined with a Keynesian economic Herbert Coombs and advocated expansion of coal trade into Asia. The Joint Coal Board was established and their new Department of Trade forged Australia’s Japanese trade agreement in 1957. Just in time – the Common Market in Europe came in and began a decline in the importance of our ‘sheep’s back’ market.
By 1970 Japan succeeded Britain as our top trade partner with the other big Asian nations soon after.
How different Australia’s economic status would have been how different our own financial circumstances would have been if it hadn’t been for the vision of these few men to push for Australia to trade with Asia especially coal.
Coal exports are so bound up with our economic welfare. Basically they have made us rich much much richer than we would otherwise have been.
The question we are now faced with is: What are we going to do in future as carbon-based fuels like coal are seen as so much part of the problem of climate change? We certainly don’t like the question but other countries are all starting to ask it too. They are looking urgently at ways to develop baseload power without coal. Whether we like it or not our thermal coal exports will be substituted for if ways can be found. Metalurgical coal is less open to substitutes. The question boils down to: Where will the energy of the future for the world come from? Where will Asia’s energy come from in the future? How will Australia earn a living in future?