On this day in 1995, the Victorian government said it would spend taxpayers money on brown coal and trying to making power stations that used it 30% more efficient in a joint venture.
“THE Victorian Government is to participate in the country’s largest research and development syndicate, a $100 million joint venture for research which could make the State’s four baseload brown coal power stations up to 30 per cent more efficient. The syndicate arranged by Bain and Company includes Perth entrepreneur Mr Kerry Stokes’ Australian Capital Equity as majority investor, with ABN Amro Australia , Mercantile Mutual , Babcock & Brown , and Deutsche Bank AG . The other investors are HRL Ltd – the former research arm of the State Electricity Commission of Victoria, now 40 per cent owned by the State – and the SECV shell. The project announced yesterday by the Victorian Minister for Energy, Mr Jim Plowman, and HRL Ltd, to construct a 10 megawatt generation facility to test the commercial viability of new coal-burning technology, is funded under the Federal Government’s 150 per cent R&D tax concessions. The study will examine integrated drying, gasification and combined cycle (IDGCC) technology, which promises – by turning low-grade coal into coal gas – to cut electricity supply costs and reduce greenhouse gases by 25 per cent.” Pheasant, B. 1995. Vic takes stake in $100m coal R&D. The Australian Financial Review, 17 March, p.9.
The backstory is that Victoria has unimaginably vast reserves of brown coal. Brown coal is less pure than black coal. And when you burn it, you get a lot more mercury ash, C02 and general crap. This means that it’s a really poor thing to export as well. So Victoria has never been able to make a go of that, despite periodic speculative schemes.
If you want to know about the guy who brought coal to Melbourne as it were, that’d be John Monash (to simplify matters somewhat).
The backstory here is that in 1989, the State Electricity Commission of Victoria came up with a plan about how to deal with greenhouse, but then was privatised, and all of that went out the window.
Why this matters.
We should know that there have been promises of technological salvation, going back a very long time. This is neither a particularly old nor particularly recent one. But it is, to use a phrase that was popularised in Victoria, for another purpose, “a dumb way to die”.
What happened next?
Brown coal continued to be burnt and burnt. And the co2 continued to accumulate, which is of course how I finish most of these blog posts.