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Companies in the Pilbara need to think bigger if Australia is to achieve both emissions reductions goals and if they want to capitalise on an annual $250 billion green iron opportunity, says a new report. Miners and oil and gas companies need to accelerate plans to share their energy infrastructure and create a single common-user electricity grid, says the Superpowering Up report from think tank Climate Energy Finance (CEF). Ending the feudal approach to energy infrastructure in the Pilbara, where every company builds and owns generation and grids on their own patch, there is scope to add the estimated $50-100 billion of extra renewable energy generation needed to decarbonise Australia’s biggest mining region. Read more

A report released by think tank Climate Energy Finance (CEF) has claimed that decarbonising the Pilbara region of Western Australia is key to doubling Australian iron exports by value to $250 billion. The report, SUPERPOWERING-UP, was released on Tuesday and warns against continued inaction in greening the Pilbara’s energy supply. According to the report, only 2 per cent of the region’s electricity is from renewables, with “fragmented corporate energy production and grid transmission structures” standing in the way of progress. It identifies a single common-user electricity grid infrastructure (CUI) as the key ingredient in decarbonising the region. Read more

A new report has recommended the Pilbara invest in common-user infrastructure (CUI) to leverage Australia’s role in resources decarbonisation. ‘SUPERPOWERING-UP: Accelerating the electrification and decarbonisation of the Pilbara’ made several recommendations to the Federal Government, including investing in renewables-powered green metals refining, critical minerals processing and cleantech manufacturing. Among the recommendations to the WA Government was the prioritisation of the development of a comprehensive single CUI plan in the Pilbara region, and the legislation of the state’s Climate Change Bill 2023 to drive acceleration of net-zero across the state. Read more

A new CEF report has found that without immediate action to decarbonise the Pilbara – and harness hydrogen – Australia risks losing its place in the future green iron industry. A new report from Climate Energy Finance (CEF) warns that failing to decarbonise and electrify Western Australia’s Pilbara region could jeopardise Australia’s future in the green iron industry. The report, titled Superpowering-Up, highlights the critical role of hydrogen in transforming Australia’s iron ore exports into high-value green iron, positioning the country as a leader in the global renewable energy market. Read more

Last week, Australian oil and gas company Woodside Energy Group Ltd announced it would buy Texas’ OCI Clean Ammonia Holding BV, a company outside Woodside’s core area of expertise. Analyst Tim Buckley, founder and director of Climate Energy Finance, called the deal “a huge overpayment for a project that’s not even operational. “It’s such an ambitious and expensive first move; the risks are stacked against them.” Read more

fDI Intelligence – Powering ahead: China’s huge investment in clean energy manufacturing and installation means it will hit its 2030 decarbonisation targets six years early. China’s global leadership in the energy system’s decarbonisation is nothing short of astonishing. There is a significant chance that the country, which represented 56% of the world’s coal consumption in 2023 according to the Energy Institute, will reach peak coal demand later this year. National carbon emissions will potentially peak and then plateau in lock-step. Read more

Liddell Power Station in Australia’s Hunter Valley burned through coal for five decades before closing last year. Opposition leader Peter Dutton now wants Liddell to be reborn as something banned in the country for a quarter of a century: a nuclear power plant. Tim Buckley, director of the Climate Energy Finance think-tank, said the opposition’s proposals would displace private capital with a “communist-style policy” requiring more than A$100bn of public funds. “It is not impossible, but it is financially illogical,” said Buckley, who questioned the move’s political motivations ahead of an election. “This is not nuclear versus renewables. This is about extending the climate wars.” Read more

[On Energy News Bulletin] Chevron Australia has reported a $3.5 billion company income tax bill for 2023, following the $4.2 billion paid it paid in tax in 2022, marking its status as one of Australia’s most significant corporate taxpayers. Tim Buckley, former MD of Research at Citigroup and the founder and director of think tank Climate Energy Finance, said the 2022 and 2023 tax payments are a very welcome development. Buckley said, “Chevron’s tax claims represents a significant positive step forward by the ATO in closing the substantial gap in corporate tax paid by multinationals in Australia over the last one to two years. We look forward to seeing similar reports from other multinational energy majors operating here.” Read more

The Minns government asked the electricity grid operator to undertake more conservative modelling which showed Eraring’s closure would create a reliability shortfall just months before giving the green light to extend the nation’s biggest coal-fired power station. Climate Energy Finance chief executive Tim Buckley questioned whether the investment necessary to defer Eraring’s retirement could have instead been used to encourage “a lot of permanent, low cost, zero emissions private projects”. “Were alternative solutions actually even sought?” he said. Read more

[Starts at 37:46] Tim Buckely told Bloomberg that Adani’s renewable energy aspirations are entirely feasible, and it is in lockstep with the Indian government. Surging power demand will complicate India’s energy transition efforts. Read more

As a confidential report to the NSW government, suggesting that closing Eraring would push power prices up, is released to the public, Tim Buckley provides a withering critique: “Does this analysis assume they (the NSW government) stand there like startled rabbits in the headlights and do absolutely nothing for a couple of years in the face of the stark knowledge that the largest coal fired power plant is at the end of its useful life and going to close? The permanent solution is not bandaids and more taxpayer subsidies for an end of life, unreliable high emissions coal clunker. $450m of tax payer monies would have crowded in a lot of permanent, low cost, zero emissions private projects.” Read more

Despite the progress to date in diversifying China’s electricity supply – and the business models of the country’s power sector SOEs – major challenges lie ahead, Ember says. A number of central SOEs also have major interests in other parts of the coal ecosystem. Central SOE China Shenhua, for example, spent 8bn yuan (about $1bn) on coal mining development and exploration, and only 824m yuan (about $113m) in hydropower in the first half of 2023, according to a report by CEF. Read more