Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

well, we will come to that—and saying, ‘For goodness sake, put these things to some practical use, but don’t try and kid us that those renewable energy certificates are genuinely reducing greenhouse gases if, back at the coal fired power station, we’re still burning as much coal because they are not a responsive operation’? You just cannot. If you have a back-up of hydropower or something like that, you can feed it in with very short response times. But, if you are burning coal and you have big steam generators and things of that nature, you cannot do it.

I have a situation in my own electorate with 650 kilowatts up the tower and 700 kilowatts of diesel gensets on the bottom. Our government, quite properly, according to its principles, is providing another $1 million to put up a second tower. I have asked the minister to put the $1 million into hydrogen generation and then run those supporting diesels on hydrogen. Then we would have a renewable power package. But in the last two days Woodside, a great Australian company, has been here telling us about its prospects and, consequently, Australia’s prospects in the export of liquefied natural gas. Natural gas is a lower level polluter per unit of energy than coal, but it is still a hydrocarbon and it still emits carbon gases. Woodside tells us of its Browse resource, which it says is as big as the North West Shelf. It wants to develop entirely offshore a virtual floating liquefaction platform—which I hope it can put on land—north-west of Broome. Broome is the commencement of the great tidal resource of the Kimberleys, a resource with the generating capacity of all the energy consumed in Australia today of whatever variety.

The interesting thing is that these people want 900 megawatts of electricity to run this facility when they put it together. To the best of my knowledge, that is 1½ times the biggest coal fired power station in Australia. How do they intend to run it? Suck the gas straight out of the ground, burn it through gas turbines and generate all this electricity with a high level of emission—and I would think a pretty serious level of consumption—of natural gas that we could otherwise be liquefying and selling to someone in some part of the world, which is the best financial return for the product.

Isn’t it better—and maybe the opposition wants to take the lead on this—that the government start looking at some of its expenditure for the purpose of building that power station on the tides? All the problems of wind do not apply to tidal energy, simply because it is predictable. Yes, it is cyclical but it is predictable, and when something is predictable it is manageable. You can use pump storage, something that is used in the Snowy, and you can do all sorts of other things to even out the load so that you can keep it, basically. But, all of a sudden, we have the foundation for a tidal energy system. I call it greenhouse with grunt, because there is a huge capacity, it is a manageable, renewable source and, as long as the moon keeps going around the earth, it will be there. That cannot be said of gas and, I guess, to a degree it cannot even be said of hot rocks—although I think hot rocks are a renewable resource that responds to many of these things.

Kyoto has been mentioned by the member for Grayndler. A piece of paper has never fixed anything and I think we should never have signed that protocol. That is not the solution. I welcome the government’s initiative to rope India, China and the United States into a single confrontation of this problem. We could be a supplier of liquid hydrogen to the world. The member for Throsby mentioned those three buses driving around Perth. They are 300 kilowatts, the size of a tractor. Taking the reference of the member for Hindmarsh to photovoltaics, put them on a farm in sufficient size and they might take up half an acre in space—but not a thousand acres to grow the fuel necessary to create biodiesel or something. If you have that there, you could be electrolysing your pesky groundwater and pump-storing hydrogen in a movable electricity generator—the same as sits on the roof of these buses—that could sit in the tractor when you were using it or in the head of the harvester when you were using that or maybe just towed behind.

These are the options when we turn to hydrogen. But outside the environmental issues—and there are people who look you straight in the eye and say ‘The emission problem is not even true’—if we want to fix the price of petrol or the price of private transport, why would we not go to the manufacture of hydrogen as the fuel of mobility? As a response to that, we have a wonderful situation because we would be producing it within Australia using the tides of the Kimberleys and we would be in a position to make sure that petrol prices as we know them—if you like, the price of running a motor car—would not be volatile and would not be dependent on the resources of other countries, particularly those that are a bit more volatile.

If we were to focus on hydrogen as the fuel of the future, we have every renewable energy source available for its manufacture but, more particularly, the tides of the Kimberleys where we have the energy to do the lot. We have the opportunity, if government were a partner, to get a 900- or, let us say, a 1,000 megawatt—that is as big, by the way, as a nuclear power station—built in the Kimberleys on truly renewable power. That is a challenge—that is not easy—but that is the sort of thing I would like to see happen. I would like to think, when the member for Throsby gets up, that she would say, ‘What a great idea, and why aren’t we doing it?’ If the Labor Party want to take the lead on an issue like this, instead of telling us we should have ratified Kyoto, I think we might get a deal—and something that might be of great assistance to the Australian people. (Time expired)

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