Roxby to require 'half the state's power'

BHP Billiton has announced an astonishing projected requirement of electricity to power the expanded Roxby Downs mine - about half of the energy used by the entire state of South Australia!

Does anyone, outside the small arena of industry spruikers and anti-green zealots, still really believe that nuclear power is going to save us from the ravages of the global warming?

Roxby is easily the world's largest uranium mine, and to make it even bigger is going to require pushing unimaginable tonnages of CO2 into the atmosphere. Not to mention the establishment of a controversial desalination plant to cull water from the head of Spencer Gulf!

This demand is going to skew the economy of electricity production in South Australia for the remainder of the 21st Century. Where will energy investment now be focussed? The state government has set no requirement on BHP that it sources any of this massive increase from renewable sources. Our state leads Australia in the establishment of wind-farm projects. Adelaide is the only capital city participating in the current Solar Cities project. Left to our own devices who knows where we may have ended up as we made piecemeal progess to carbon-neutrality?

another dirty great power station?

But this huge surge in required production will predictably lead to a push to invest in another mega fossil-fuel power station - the state's third. Effectively squeezing out vital renewable technologies in the process.

Wind turbines and solar panels simply won't be able to provide such a huge volume of baseload power. While we have hot rocks aplenty this is still an unproven technology. This leaves only two options; firstly the state's gas fields in the far north-east as a dirty, but not perhaps filthy, fuel source to run the turbines. Or, scarily, we do just happen to have a lot of coal nearby! Dear old dirty, dirty coal freight-trained down from the demolition of a large swathe of the northern Flinders Ranges at Leigh Creek already powers the Playford power station at Port Augusta, current power provider to Roxby Downs.

So, in order to provide the allegedly 'clean, green' fuel that will power the future of the world we may be asked to build a giant coal-fired station! Or gas. Or both. This is before we even consider the carbon resources expended by the various massive machines required in the physical creation of what will be one of the world's largest holes in the ground.

Nuclear power is out, I might add. Not only is it politically unpalatable, as the previous federal government discovered to its cost, it's just too expensive and the stations take far too long to come on line.

And anyone suggesting that much-vaunted 'clean coal' technology may save the day is faced with admitting that this technology is also unproven, and may require a breathtaking 40% of the increased power demand again to run its own scrubbing operations.

an absurd addiction to the gigantic

The expansion of Roxby Downs is a great snapshot of the absurdity of our 'globalised' addiction to giantism. A gigantic economy with titanic power demands can only conceive of more super-scale solutions to the very problems that bloated excess and massive over-subscription to natural services has spawned in the first place. And all of the super-scale solutions happen to involved massive increases in carbon output that will allegedly facilitate a decrease one or two decades down the road. Despite growth forecasts making it highly unlikely the fossil fuels won't simply be burned anyway.

But do we even have one or two decades? Today I watched a video of a whole new chunk of Antarctic ice breaking off into the ocean and floating away, well ahead of any greenhouse schedule. I've just sweltered through the longest hot spell in my state's recorded history here in Adelaide - 15 days above 35°C (95°F), easily the hottest period ever recorded for an Australian capital. The nation's one major river system - the Murray/Darling - is in collapse, with drinkers, graziers and irrigators 'entitled' to more than double the actual amount of water that exists, and the lower lakes of my home state now likely to be dammed out of the freshwater system and then flooded with sea-water to allow resort residents to be able to step straight from their marinas and onto the decks of their cabin cruisers.

Forget the DotComs and the dodgily mortgaged US housing market - the globalised mega-market has been the greatest bubble in human history and is collapsing around us as we speak, at an economic cost that's yet to be determined, and a cost in natural capital that can only be compared to the impact of a comet strike. Mega-capitalism is functionally unable to conceive of any solution that does not perpetuate its own growth, and its media organs will never concede that such a possibility even exists. It's up to us to do that.

BHP to use half of state's electricity

Jeremy Roberts - Business, The Australian, March 27th 2008

BHP Billiton will need nearly half of South Australia's current electricity supply to power its vastly expanded Olympic Dam copper and uranium mine.

The mining company wrote to potential suppliers this month revealing that power demand for the mine was expected to top 690megawatts when it reaches full production in 10 years.

This 30 per cent increase on previous forecasts for the mine 600km northwest of Adelaide is equivalent to nearly 42 per cent of South Australia's total electricity consumption and nearly half of Adelaide's power supply.

An industry insider yesterday described as "staggering" BHP's new power needs, which exceed previous forecasts by 170mW.

It would require the building of new power stations in the state at a time when incentives for business to invest in traditional power generation are clouded by efforts to combat global warming.

The new BHP forecast comes a week after the Rudd Government's Garnaut report on greenhouse emissions recommended power generators not be compensated in a carbon trading scheme.

South Australia has been an importer of electricity for several years, and its power distribution system was stretched to capacity to meet demand during the record heatwave earlier this month.

BHP is the state's largest single power consumer, taking 120mW. The company will use the aditional 570mW to power on-site mineral processing to separate uranium, copper and gold, as well as for the expanded Roxby Downs township, a larger airport and the new open-cut mining operation.

The instability in the power generation sector adds to the challenges BHP faces in developing Olympic Dam.

A company spokeswoman yesterday described the request for 690mW of power as an estimate. "The expansion project remains in pre-feasibility and is yet to be approved," she said. But in correspondence to the state's power suppliers, dated March 5 and marked "commercial in confidence", BHP calls for expressions of interest to supply the power.

The correspondence was followed by in-person briefings on March 12, and asks suppliers to address three supply options: power generation at the Olympic Dam site, elsewhere in the state, or a combination of both.

The company says 60mW of the power would be used to run a desalination plant planned for the coast of the Upper Spencer Gulf, and to pump the water 320km north to Olympic Dam.

Providing the additional power within a 10-year timeframe will challenge South Australia's energy planners.

Gas-fired power stations normally take up to three years to build, industry sources said. Queensland's largest coal-fired power station, Kogan Creek in the western Darling Downs, which was opened last December, took four years to build.

Sourcing base-load renewable energy from "hot rocks" geothermal sources in the north of the state may become an option, but the technology has not yet been proved viable.

The South Australian Government has not imposed any mandatory requirements on BHP to source renewable energy.

South Australian Greens MP Mark Parnell said the lack of renewable energy sources for Olympic Dam would make the state a "greenhouse pariah".

"Our state risks being left with a huge carbon black hole as we become the greenhouse dump for one of the world's richest companies," Mr Parnell said.

'Marathon Man' - Independent Weekly 11-17/08/07

Bill Nicholas - Adelaide Independent Weekly, CBD section, 11th-17th August 2007

[Abridged version and all emphasis in the following article is by Bill Doyle - see link at bottom for the original text]

"Adelaide-based mineral exploration company Marathon Resources has a new leader at the helm. Anybody who's been to the northern Flinders Ranges knows the breathtaking sight across ancient red rocks to the shimmering salt pan of Lake Frome is a very special place.

Just north of the Arkaroola Sanctuary, the Mt Painter, Mt Gee and Paralana Hot Springs provide an amazing place to refresh after an overdose of civilisation -- in the mountains you can be free to wander the goat tracks, the wonderful creek beds, enjoy the sparkling night skies and especially the priceless views.

So how ironic is it that it's also the site of a uranium deposit currently worth in the vicinity of seven billion dollars -- that's $7000 million...

During WW2 uranium ore was dug out from around Mt Painter and strapped to the backs of camels that walked across the mountains on camel pads to the railway at Copley where it was sent on its way to the US atomic war effort.

In the late '60s a Brisbane outfit, Exoil NL, bulldozed tracks up East Painter Gorge, around Mt Painter to Mt Gee and up Radium Ridge, where drilling rigs discovered the extent of the uranium orebody that Mawson and Sprigg had been prospecting decades before.

Exoil geologists decided that, while the original orebody lay quite close to the surface in the mountains, over millions of years the rain had washed enough of it out to the plains on the edge of Lake Frome where, predictably enough, the Beverley uranium deposit was developed.

CRA, now Rio, reworked the area in the early '90s but relinquished the area there following the collapse of uranium prices at that time.

Marathon Resources' ...picked up the exploration licences for the northern Flinders Ranges area several years ago as the market for uranium (and the listed players) was beginning to revive from a 20-year slumber.

...Three months ago Santich hired Stuart Hall, from BHP Billiton, as managing director...

[Marathon] is planning an underground horizontal drive that snakes into the mountains from the plain near the East Painter Gorge. It's about a 10km trip so the plan is to mine deposits that are closest to East Painter and gradually make their way into the Mt Gee, Armchair and Radium Ridge orebodies. Processing would be done at East Painter Creek -- either a heap leach or a tank leach to produce 1000 tonnes of U3O8 a year -- giving the deposit a life of 15 years...

Next year will involve a pre-feasibility study, followed by a feasibility study in 2009 and construction scheduled to begin late that year.

...[Y]ellowcake will be produced by the Mt Gee mine...Areva and BHP Billiton are the likely customers for the Mt Gee yellowcake which will then be shipped direct to probably European nuclear reactors.

Hall said uranium prices had been helped along by the end of the stockpile of weapons-grade uranium which had finally run out after 20 years of its supply to the nuclear industry.

There had been massive over-production of the mineral during the '60s and '70s and, following the end of the Cold War and the decommissioning of nuclear weapons, had seen the conversion of uranium from missiles into the fuel cycle.

"This supplied about 50 per cent of the uranium needed for reactor fuel so now that has come to an end, we are seeing uranium prices reaching record levels," Hall said.

"With only 50 per cent of the uranium supply coming from mines, production needs to double over the next five years," he said. "Because it takes at least ten years to build a reactor, the demand for uranium can be predicted with some certainty." - "

LINKS

full article at the Independent Weekly online

Don't think the Arkaroola Sanctuary is an appropriate place for a Uranium mine? Got your doubts about the 'sustainability' of leach pits or tanks on the East Painter creek? What happens to the 'overburden' (i.e landscape) if it turns out not to be 'economic' to use the giant shaft?

Let the state government know your concerns - see the 'now is the write time - run marathon off' article, here or at right.

I have appended a letter to the Environment Minister taking into account this new information as a comment (#7) below this 'write now' article.