Low emissivity

• The outcry was loud and swift last week after Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek approved a new coal mine in central Queensland.
• It’s the first coal mine Labor has approved since coming to power a year ago.
• The project, the Isaac River mine, will extract metallurgical coal to be burned for steel-making.

A lesson in spin-doctoring

• But in reality, scuppering the mines was an easy and relatively uncontroversial decision for Plibersek.
• Indeed, MacMines abandoned its proposal in 2019 and the phone number for its Darwin office is no longer even connected.
• That news came six days later, when details of the Isaac River mine approval were quietly uploaded to the federal environment department’s website.
• The coal mine, east of Moranbah, will reportedly produce about 500,000 tonnes of metallurgical coal each year for five years.

Thermal vs coking coal

• In weighing up the merits of Plibersek’s decision on the Isaac River mine, we must make a distinction between thermal coal, used in electricity generation, and metallurgical or “coking” coal, used in steel-making.
• Metallurgical coal accounts for about half of Australia’s coal exports by tonnage, but the great majority by value.
• By continuing to export thermal coal, Australia is delaying the inevitable transition for the sake of short-term profits.

Let’s not get distracted

• That approval was not the only decision made by Plibersek last week, or the most important one.
• She also allowed three other mine projects – two in New South Wales and one in Queensland – to proceed to the next stage of environmental assessment.
• These projects had been sent back to Plibersek for further consideration after an environment group requested the effects of climate change be considered.
• It would produce about 12 million tonnes of thermal coal a year – more than the Adani Carmichael mine.

Big coal tests remain

• But none of the approval decisions announced by Labor so far differ from those we might have expected under the Coalition.
• Many more federal decisions on coal mining projects are yet to come.
• Read more:
  Tanya Plibersek killed off Clive Palmer's coal mine.

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