General Discussions

[ElwoodBlues1]

I won't write too much here we have an energy thread.

I understand a large chunk of Australia's export is black coal used for coking not energy, and even when we transition to clean energy that won't change as the demand for coking coal as steel production will not diminish even though steel mills move to greener energy, the coking coal is part of a chemical process to make steel not part of the energy production.

Not sure we export much brown coal, it's is mostly used domestically for energy production.

The coal everybody wants to trade is the black stuff, it sells at a far higher price, so much so there is a lot of R&D going into techniques to turn brown to black. The higher the black coal quality the better the alloys you can make.

Interestingly Japan mostly buys black coal for it's high tech energy production, black coal burns cleaner so it's easier to deal with the waste, Japan's technologies eliminate about 80% of the waste emissions. Protestors will still rally against this but as a short term transitional solution that technology is as good as immediately shutting 80% of your coal fired power plants, actually for Australia it would be equivalent to shutting even more than 80% because the brown coal we burn for energy is not as clean. The only long term viable solution is still nuclear be it fission or fusion, several countries that historically closed nuclear are now reversing the decision, they have become woke to the lobbyist tactics.

Solar, wind and other renewable energy lobbyists tend to just lump coal(pun intended) all in the same basket.

PS; When Australia stops selling black coal or supply is limited, China and India do their best to get it from other sources like Borneo and the Amazon Basin! The lobbyists paint us as vandals, but the truth is far more complicated.

China (Mainland) have 1,100 coal fired power plants and are building another 1.1 billion dollar plant, around 75% of the worlds total, thats a lot of coal......Japs are building another 22 power stations running on Aussie coal.
Ukraine have been buying their gas from Poland, Romania and couple of other countries thus cutting dependence on Russia and were about to do isolation testing in an attempt to breakaway from the Russian electricity grid but Putin timed his invasion for the day they were going to experiment by cutting the Russian link. Ukraine want to hook up with Western Europe and become part of that grid and dump the Ruskies and Belarusian distibution networks which they are tied to at the moment.
Vlad wasnt having Ukraine cut all power ties and while I know electrical stability will be an issue if Ukraine join the other EU grid, the US and other countries were going to help them achieve their goal.
For all Putins political rhetoric about saving Russians living in Ukraine from the mythical Nazi Zelensky regime it all gets back to money and big business and the leverage Russia has on many countries in terms of energy supply.
No surprise he wants to be paid in Ruble's now which means other countries have to buy them so he is trying to counter the effect sanctions have had and how much the ruble has plummeted in value.