So, a little follow up from the Mark Mcgowan-EPA story.
Roger Cooks basically said today he’d back the mining industry peeps over the rest of WA.
I don’t think he meant it to come across that way. But if your not in the mining industry, well it seems your pretty low priority. Or am I taking his words too negatively?
Gas is absolutely a fossil fuel. And as my first paragraph says it is the lynchpin of WA’s power supply.
Trying to understand where the confusion lies in ‘don’t you count gas as a fosiil fuel?’, i think you were misdirected by my wording ‘all but 2.5% is fossil fuels’. Another way for me to say that is, ‘2.5% of WA’s power generation is from renewables, and the rest is fossil fuels, of which Gas is the major part.’
The question is, ‘How much value is captured by Western Australia as people and place from the LNG, and thus petroleum industry?’
$38 000 000 000 is a lot of income for the petroleum industry. But $100 000 000 is my surface level guess at how much of that actually goes into the pockets of Western Australians, so quite a small fraction of the total. (Note: There are other monetary and non-monetary benefits to the industry i’ve ignored, because ‘too hard’).
Your last paragraph in this response confuses me again. But i’ll see if I can address it. There is value to the industry, but it could reasonably be replaced by other minerals, such as, rare earths that are tipped to explode in price this century.
Its impact on our economy in monetary, (not energy supply), terms is not like Iron ore, in which we capture a great deal more value through royalties. To “recreate value somewhere else”, isn’t the right way to look at any industry, it supposes the economy is a static beast, where like for like can be replaced, it is not, especially WA, as demand in a commodity we own surges we should have a windfall, but high demand doesn’t last forever, and droughts occur. This is a possible prospect we may be starting to see with Iron Ore and Chinese demand.