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Growth in mining hampered by a lack of geoscientists

By Gregory Webb - posted Thursday, 7 December 2006


At the same time, palaeontologists are documenting the effects of recent climate change on Australia’s ancient faunas and ecosystems. Without such data we cannot begin to predict Australia’s future climate or its likely effects on our environment.

However, we currently are producing fewer professional geoscientists than are retiring from industry due to a demographic bulge in the average age of the professional workforce (currently well over 50 years).

On top of that, the Minerals Council of Australia has concluded that growth in the mining industry over the next decade will lead to the need about 7,600 new geologists and engineers, and those figures do not include the oil and gas industries. As our most skilled and experienced professionals retire, it is unlikely that they will be replaced in number, and it is probably impossible for them to be replaced in kind.

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Disturbingly, despite the great number of jobs and incredibly high salaries for new and recent geoscience graduates (for example, $55,000 to more than $100,000 a year), student numbers are low. These low student numbers have impacted on universities at the same time as a wave of economic rationalisation in university funding.

Universities are now funded on a formula based primarily on student numbers. There is no strategic oversight to ensure that critical skills will be taught across the nation; offerings are increasingly market driven and based on the decisions of enrolling high school students. Disciplines that are expensive to teach and have low student numbers, such as science and engineering, provide inadequate income and increasingly are viewed as drains on struggling university budgets.

The net result has been downsizing of teaching staff, merging of many departments into combined schools with other disciplines, and the closing of entire departments. Of 28 geoscience departments in Australian universities in 1990, only five independent geoscience departments remain. In Queensland, the last independent School of Earth Sciences at James Cook University merged this year into a combined School of Earth and Environmental Science. Hence, a state that single-handedly ranks among the largest coal exporting nations in the world, lacks an independent geology department in any of its universities.

Also worrying is the fact that the degradation of university departments in the geosciences has been a global phenomenon. For example, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists reported that only 430 geologists graduated with Bachelors degrees in the United States in 2005! That compares to just over 100 geology graduates in Australia over the same time interval according to the Department of Education Science and Training. Global competition for geoscientists will only increase.

So why are student numbers so low when jobs are so plentiful and salaries are so high?

First, employment in the extractive industries has traditionally followed global economic cycles, and the last major downturn in the late 1990s left many professionals seeking other lines of employment. However, that cyclicity in employment is now buffered by the bulge in retirement-aged professionals and increasing levels of employment in the environmental sector.

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Second, there is a poor public perception of the extractive industries, based largely on one-sided, poorly informed and unfair criticism by parts of the environmental movement. Only a tiny fraction of Australian land is affected by the “dreaded” mining industry. In reality, agriculture and urban sprawl do far more environmental damage. Strip mines may be unsightly, but they are ephemeral. They must be rehabilitated and, as far as possible, returned to native habitat once the mine runs its course. Land utilised for agriculture and for human occupation and development, on the other hand, remains degraded forever.

And can we do without the extractive industries? Look around you wherever you are and remove all the stone, cement, bricks and other ceramics, all the metals, glass and even plastics (which are petroleum-based), and what do you have left? You’re sitting amid wooden boards with nothing to hold them together, soft paper, and natural fibers like wool and cotton.

That is the house of cards we live in without the extractive industries, and never mind energy. You’ll be in the dark, because there will be almost no power generation, no wires to conduct electricity anyway, no solar cells, and not even a candle, because candle wax, like plastics, is a product of petroleum. And by the way, the wood came from logging a natural habitat or from a plantation that replaced a destroyed natural habitat. The extractive industries are not the environmental villains here; we share that distinction collectively.

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First published in The Australian on November 22, 2006.



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About the Author

Gregory Webb is a senior lecturer and researcher with the Queensland University of Technology's school of natural resource sciences.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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