By ALEX McKENZIE
The massive $21 billion Carmichael coal mine proposed for the Galilee Basin in Queensland is dividing the country, the state and the Labor Party.
The mega coal project proposed by Indian mining company Adani has caused outrage over its potential environmental impact, missed job opportunities and investment.
A troubled proposal
Adani’s final investment decision has been delayed until its next board meeting after finalising a new royalties payment arrangement where it will have to “pay every cent”.
The Queensland government announced last week that the company would have to pay full royalties after a proposed $320 million sweetener was taken off the table.
The company is seeking a $900 million loan to help build a 389km railway line connecting the project to the Abbot Point coal port after the state government said it would no longer facilitate such a loan from the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility (NAIF). This rail access would enable coal to be exported to India, however, India is rapidly shifting to renewable power and may not want by the time it becomes available.
A loan from the NAIF would usually be administered by the state but Queensland wants the federal government to speak directly with Adani.
Private funds are proving increasingly difficult to secure after Westpac was the last of the four major banks to rule out funding for the coal project recently. The bank’s new climate change policy prohibits investment in the low quality coal found in the Galilee Basin.
Scientists have also voiced concerns about the environmental damage caused by dredging the Great Barrier Reef so that coal can be shipped through it.
Jobs, jobs, jobs
The project would provide up to 1500 jobs in North Queensland, an area which has been hit hard by the demise of traditional manufacturing and resource jobs.
Original promises of 10,000 jobs touted by Adani, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and other federal politicians were shown to be false by Adani’s own expert. But there would still be hundreds of available jobs, gaining support from local groups including the Townsville Regional Council.
“The position of [Townsville Regional Council] is to support Townsville to picking up the fly-in-fly-out base for both the construction phase and the operation of the mine,” the council’s media advisor Tony Wode says.
“It’s a matter for the regulators to make sure that they have full confidence that these companies fulfil their obligations in terms of their environmental conditions. We’re receiving those assurances from the government,” he says.
#StopAdani
Thousands have joined the #Stop Adani Campaign in an effort to mobilise Australians against the project and pressure the Queensland and federal government.
Influential environmentalist and former Greens leader Bob Brown launched the Stop Adani campaign, calling it “this generation’s Franklin River”.
Australian Conservation Foundation economist Matthew Rose says their strategy is to stop the mine by building community opposition across the country.
“The Carmichael mine cannot proceed if the world is to avoid devastating climate change,” he says.
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Sydney street artist Scott March's mural of Malcolm Turnbull with an Indian version of the Simpsons' gangster character Fat Tony was a response to the PM's deal with Adani.
The Adani mega mine proposal
Adani is in the final stages of a proposal to build Australia’s largest mine with potential reserves of 2.3 billion tonnes of coal, including five underground mines and six open-cut pits.
In early April, Mr Turnbull met with Adani’s chair Gautam Adani while on a state trip to India, to encourage the company to go ahead with the mine. Mr Turnbull assured Mr Adani that native title challenges would not stop the mine from being built.
The Queensland government has also granted Adani a license with unlimited access to groundwater. The company is only required to keep track of and report on its water usage, and has the power to execute its own water reviews.
Adani claims the coal would be used to power millions of homes in India despite the country not needing any new coal-fired power stations until 2027 and concern over the demand for coal imports in the next few years because of surging domestic supply and massive investment in renewable energy.
Coal vs the Great Barrier Reef: Pollution and climate change
One of Australia’s national treasures, the Great Barrier Reef, has seen its worst bout of coral bleaching this year and last year on record. This extreme bleaching has been linked to warmer ocean temperatures due to climate change.
Australian Research Centre for Coral Reef Studies deputy director Dr Malcolm McCulloch says in the 2016 event, more than half of the northern half of the reef was "severely affected" by coral bleaching.
This year’s coral bleaching phenomenon has seen “about an 18 per cent contribution to the death of the reef” extending to the south, he says.
Dr McCulloch is concerned the mine will exacerbate the problems the reef is already facing.
“[Adani] are trying to build big port facilities and so we’re worried about that problem,” he says.
Dr McCulloch expressed concern over the fossil fuel emissions from the mine and its impact on climate change.
“Coal usage [has an impact on the Great Barrier Reef] through increasing CO2 … which affects coral reefs,” he says.
“[The Adani mine] is not a good move.”
If built, the coal project will make it much harder for Australia to meet its emission reduction goals, he says.
Former CSIRO chief Atmospheric Research (1992-2002) and current Monash senior research fellow Dr Graeme Pearman says the overall objective is “to avoid going over the planet warming by 2 degrees”. This is a politically important threshold which is seen as a maximum allowable temperature increase to avoid a climate catastrophe.
“The promises made by our government are not good enough to achieve that,” Dr Pearman says.
The coal from the Adani mine alone, if burned, would push the world one-third of the way towards the global 2-degree threshold.