Dartbrook Mine, an underground thermal coal joint venture in the Hunter Valley, had sat empty since 2006 until it was revived at the end of last year. Its owner, ASX-listed Australian Pacific Coal, last month failed to meet its obligations for a $174 million loan to key backer Vitol, a Singapore-based commodities giant. Australian Pacific Coal has now called in administrators from Deloitte and requested an “immediate” trading suspension on the stock market. Vitol has since appointed receivers, insolvency firm FTI Consulting, to claw back its millions. Read more

Have Australian CBAM enthusiasts been dreaming too small? Is an Asian CBAM the secret sauce for clean trade in our region? Have Frankie and Luke now read enough CBAM papers to level up and get a CBAM merit badge? Tennant licks his lips as your intrepid hosts devour a new report from Climate Energy Finance, ‘A Price On Carbon: Building Towards an Asian CBAM’. While this wasn’t necessarily the CBAM paper we were looking for, authors Matt Pollard and Tim Buckley make carbon pricing padawans of us all – and maybe all those DFAT folks who need to use the force to sell this idea – and give us the basic commands for a future Asian CBAM Read more

The Bonaparte CCS project is owned by Inpex, Woodside and TotalEnergies, which want to store captured carbon dioxide under the seabed on a site about 250km offshore from Darwin from 2030. Science and industry minister Tim Ayres awarded major project status to the CCS project and the Northern Silica project, and extended the status to Mike Cannon-Brookes’ Sun Cable project and the Broken Hill cobalt blue project, as part of the federal government’s effort to modernise the country’s energy system. Read more

Tim Buckley, director of think tank Climate Energy Finance (CEF), who spoke exclusively with ESN Premium ahead of the launch of the scheme, believes it will likely make Australia a “red-hot market” for new energy storage systems and help build out local supply chains. Read more

In China, more wind turbines and solar panels were installed last year than in the rest of the world combined. And China’s clean energy boom is going global. Chinese companies are building electric vehicle and battery factories in Brazil, Thailand, Morocco, Hungary and beyond. Read more

“Just staggering,” wrote Tim Buckley, head of Climate and Energy Finance. “China installed 92.9GW of solar and 26.3GW of wind in just the month on May 2025! “ Before we get too excited, there is a pull-forward on installs with a national strategic policy change on renewables that took effect from June 2025 – so we see a real risk of a significant slowdown for the rest of 2025. Read more

The weekend saw a seismic escalation in the conflict in the Middle East, as the US bombed Iran’s key uranium enrichment facilities. This followed Israel’s campaign of military intervention on the justification that Iran must be prevented from developing nuclear capabilities. The situation represents a dramatic increase in geopolitical instability in the region – a key source of global fossil fuel energy production and exports – and has potentially dire consequences for worldwide energy markets and economies dependent on imports for their energy needs. Australia is one such economy. Read more

China leads the world by a huge and growing margin across almost all of the frontiers of our decarbonised future, from sophisticated clean tech manufacturing to domestic renewable energy installations to foreign direct investment into the energy transition. In April alone, China installed over 45GW of solar power capacity, more than Australia’s entire solar fleet. Read more

The Highlights * Tim’s TED X Sydney * Net-Zero Export Target Proposal: ANU’s Frank Jotzo and Annette Zou * Heavy Equipment Decarbonisation: BHP signs MoU with China’s XCMG * China’s Cleantech Outbound Investment (OFDI): China building cleantech infrastructure abroad (e.g., 10GWh EV battery plant in France for Renault). $170B tracked in cleantech OFDI since 2023 Read more

On a recent delegation, I saw the futuristic factory of solar giant Longi in Jiaxing, with its omnipresent robots, combining automation, big data, AI and 5G to flexibly customise solar module components for diverse application scenarios and customers, revolutionising advanced manufacturing at massive scale. This is not an isolated case. China leads the world by a huge and growing margin across almost all of the frontiers of our decarbonised future, from sophisticated clean tech manufacturing to domestic renewable energy installations to foreign direct investment into the energy transition. Read more

Electricity prices in South East Queensland, South Australia, and New South Wales are set to rise from 1 July, with NSW seeing an 8–10% increase under the Default Market Offer (DMO). Some providers, such as Momentum Energy, are raising rates by up to 25%. Energy Minister Chris Bowen will today announce a review of the DMO, aiming to prioritise public interest over energy company profits. Tim Buckley, Director of Climate Energy Finance, criticised the current system, urging consumers to shop around annually to avoid a “loyalty tax”. While reforms are expected next year, households will face higher prices in the meantime. Read more

Electrification and decarbonization are key global themes in 2025, as are rapidly changing geopolitical circumstances. While some countries are abrogating their global commitments to act on climate science while upending world trade, there is also a growing interest in re-aligning towards countries and regions keen to pursue enhanced cooperation and collaboration. As the environmental and economic costs of climate change continue to rise, both the economics and energy independence benefits of the 28th session of the Conference of Parties (COP28) pledge by almost 200 countries back in 2023 to triple renewable energy deployments by 2030 looks more and more strategically compelling Read more