Late last year, The Conversation created the below infographic explaining the key impacts expected from Adani’s Carmichael mega coal mine, which is well worth a look:
For mine, the most damning information contained in this infographic is that:
A hired gun consultant for Adani’s Carmichael mega coal mine project, Frontier Economics’ Danny Price, has penned an article in The AFR claiming that anyone that is against Adani is “against lifting the world’s poorest out of poverty”:
Once mined, [Adani’s] coal will be sent by a railway, constructed as part of the project, to the Adani-owned Abbot Point port, from where it will be shipped to the Indian province of Gujarat, to fuel among others, the Adani Mundra power plant.
This power plant generates electricity for some of the poorest people in the world so they can have lighting to study at night and power for clean water.
Reliable power is also crucial to attract industry so that people can have jobs to lift themselves out of poverty…
Danny Price might want to review the comments from the former head of India’s Ministry of Power, E.A.S Sarma, who dismissed his argument as false and misguided:
“The Australian politicians are obviously not properly briefed by their offices about the viability of Adani coal,” Mr Sarma, who has done a detailed analysis of the properties of the coal at Adani’s Carmichael deposit and the economics of its planned mining venture, said.
“My assessment is that by the time the Adani coal leaves the Australian coast, [it] will be about $90 a tonne.
“We cannot afford that, it is so expensive. My assessment is it will not be possible for the Indian market to absorb Adani coal.”
He said people in India without access to electricity were, in the main, either too poor to afford electricity, living in remote rural areas where the infrastructure costs of supplying power were extremely expensive, or both.
Coal from the Carmichael venture could not provide electricity at an affordable price for such citizens.
Advertisement
Price might also want to consider that India’s Minister for State Power has acknowledged that the cost of solar power is now cheaper than coal:
Ultimately, arguments against the Adani Carmichael project are strong. Not only would the project flood the world with coal, thus depressing its price and putting mines in NSW and QLD out of business, but it would jeopardise the environment – both globally via exacerbating climate change and locally through threatening the Great Barrier Reef.
Advertisement
- Adani would be allowed to extract unlimited volumes of water from the Great Artesian Basin for 60-years (a projected 12 billion litres a year); and
- It would burn 4.49 billion tonnes of carbon dioxite equivalent if/when the mine hits peak production (out of total global fossil fuel emissions of 37 billion in 2017).
In short, the project is economic and environmental vandalism writ large.
Advertisement
