Green aluminium? Tell Albo he’s dreaming

A famous line in an Australian film almost three decades old is the first thought that came to mind when I heard Labor’s latest renewable energy pipedream - $2 billion to subsidise “green aluminium” production.

“Tell him he’s dreaming” was  uttered by Darryl Kerrigan’s main character in  The Castle,  when authorities tried to acquire his home to expand an airport. It’s now an ingrained part of our Aussie vernacular.

But listening to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese making the announcement that this latest subsidy to promote unreliable renewable energy on top of the billions in subsidies already forked out at state and federal level, shows there’s no limit to what the Labor Government will do in an attempt to achieve the unachievable.

Under this latest “plan”, Australia’s existing aluminium producers will receive taxpayer support for every tonne of “green aluminium” they manage to make, up to 2036. Apparently the PM, Energy Minister Chris Bowen and Science and Industry Minister Ed Husic believe that moving  the country’s $5.1 billion aluminum industry to renewable energy will bolster Labor’s aim to lower  emissions by 43 per cent from 2005 levels  by 2030. They also think this will  protect a sector vital to our economy - one of our last surviving manufacturing industries. This also comes on top of the $13.4 billion in production tax credits for “green hydrogen” and critical minerals unveiled in last year’s budget under its Future Made in Australia policy.

It doesn’t matter what colour you call it or however you make it, hydrogen (h2) always remains the same colourless, corrosive, explosive gas that claimed 36 lives when Germany’s Hindenburg Airship exploded and burned back in 1937.

A major supporter of the fabled green hydrogen, billionaire Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest, last year slashed 700 Fortescue Mining jobs and backed away from its plan to produce 15 million tonnes of this gas by 2030.

Hot on Twiggy’s heels, OriginEnergy dropped out of the major Hunter Valley Hydrogen Hub project, citing uncertainty in the market for the alternative fuel.

It comes as another major blow to the federal government's green hydrogen ambitions, according to the ABC:

One of Australia's biggest energy companies has pulled out of plans to build the country's biggest green hydrogen plant, saying the fuel is too expensive to produce.

In a blow to the federal government's ambitions of developing a green hydrogen industry in Australia, Origin Energy on Thursday said it was walking away from a planned project near Newcastle in New South Wales.

The project, known as the Hunter Valley Hydrogen Hub, includes explosives giant Orica and was set to involve the production of 5,500 tonnes a year of hydrogen made using renewable energy.

This also saw the NSW Government step in and extend the life of the Eraring coal fired power station from August 2025 until August 2027.

But returning to aluminium production, I doubt if many Australians, including Albo and “Blackout Bowen”, realise it’s a very energy intensive three-stage process requiring a constant, reliable 24/7 power source.

The first stage is the mining of the raw red ore, bauxite, at sites such as Weipa (north Queensland) Gove (Northern Territory) and Huntly and Willowdale (West Australia). The bauxite then goes through a refining process using caustic soda to produce a white granular powder, alumina, which is then transported to smelters where molten aluminium is produced in “potlines” using a high energy electrolytic process before it is finally poured and solidified into ingots or rods. If power is lost for more than a short time, there is the risk of the metal solidifying in the potlines which would put them out of production for an extended period. This was why Comalco, the then- owners of Boyne Smelters at Gladstone, paid a whopping $750 million to Queensland’s Goss Labor Government in 1994 to acquire the Gladstone Power Station to ensure a reliable power supply was available for a $1billion expansion of its smelter.

The biggest threat to reliable supply then was industrial action, as powerful electrical unions had been known to strike over issues including cold sausage rolls in the power station cafeteria  and a demand for undercover parking for workers’ cars.

I kid you not and I must admit to having some skin in the Gladstone game as I was privy to a lot of goings- on as editor of the  Gladstone Observer newspaper for a period of about 15 years before a subsequent manager dropped Gladstone from the title and it became just The Observer (maybe in an attempt to big-note with the big-name UK masthead which was no relation whatsoever).

All water under the bridge and it no longer exists in print form, but I did gain some good first-hand knowledge of the aluminium industry, thanks to Comalco, which is now part of the international Rio Tinto group.

The Queensland Alumina Ltd (QAL) refinery had  been operating and producing alumina for export for about 10 years when I took up my post in 1977. I was regarded with considerable suspicion by the local union power brokers and State Labor Member, who were sure I was a “Joh Bjelke-Petersen plant” as my previous role had been editor of two newspapers based in Joh’s hometown of Kingaroy - The South Burnett Times and The Central Burnett Times.

But Joh was very busy working to bring Queensland on to the world stage with lucrative international coal exports, battling the unions, and other matters which saw him fly home to Kingaroy just for weekend R and R with his family on his  property, Bethany. We didn't have much personal contact and I was never “Joh’s plant”.

Thanks to Comalco I was given insights into the aluminium industry with visits to the Weipa mine where I was surprised to see an attractive young woman driving one of the open-wheeler  haul trucks back when DEI hadn’t even been dreamed of. She obligingly posed for a photo, dwarfed alongside the towering machine and its huge wheels.

My visit stirred local conjecture that an announcement was imminent for a start on the Boyne Island Smelter, but that had to wait a couple of years before that long anticipated project got underway in 1979, with completion in 1982.

I was included as a Comalco guest in a high level group including the local Mayor, Shire Chairman and Port Authority executives to visit their aluminium smelter at Tiwai Point near Bluff  on New Zealand’s South Island. The trip was a memorable one because it also included some highlights such as a wild ride in a jet boat on the Shotover River (before they tamed it down after some tourist fatalities) , a chairlift ride to the amazing Stratosphere mountain-top  restaurant at Queenstown, and a float plane landing on an isolated inland lake to inspect the impressive Manapouri hydro-electric plant. This had been constructed in an excavated cavern  below the lake, which reminded me of a scene from a James Bond movie.

Construction of the Boyne Island smelter provided a huge boost to the twin towns of Boyne Island and Tannum Sands, also the entire Gladstone region through employment, but not everyone was happy with the rapid construction of workers’ homes close to the smelter. Environmentalists said in some cases they were too close to avoid any potential fallout, and when The Observer ran a front-page giving voice to those concerns, I was summoned to the CEO’s office to “please explain”. He had some other senior executives to back him when he asked something along the lines of, “How could you print that after all we have done for you?” (Free trips and lots of long lunches implied).

“Well sorry but journalism doesn’t work like that for me, and you had the right to reply…” After that we still enjoyed a good working relationship, their presence in the long term was mostly very beneficial, but they knew they weren’t above legitimate criticism.

The industry continued to expand in Gladstone with the construction of Rio Tinto's new Yarwun alumina refinery, which shipped its first alumina in 2004.

But I’m not the only one who thinks “green aluminium” is a pipe dream.  Opposition leader Peter Dutton has called Labor’s plan a $2 billion con job and Energy expert Aidan Morrison argued the move highlighted the failure of renewable energy sources to deliver reliable, low-cost power without billions in taxpayer support.

Mr Morrison, the Energy Program Director at the Centre for Independent Studies, told Sky News the announcement proved renewables could not deliver enough energy:

‘The announcement that the Albanese government will hand out billions in subsidies to support aluminium, confirms an underlying truth about energy,’ he said.

‘You can't provide reliable, low-cost energy from the wind and sun alone.’

Amen. The need to remove Australia's ban on nuclear energy which is being widely embraced by other developed nations, and let it compete in an open market without propping up intermittent unreliable “renewables” with billions in subsidies, has never been more obvious.

Labor should heed the new leader of the free world, President Donald Trump, who promised in his inauguration speech this week to oppose wind turbines, declare an energy emergency, withdraw from the Paris climate accord and “drill baby drill”.

As Bob Dylan once sang, “The times, they are a changin’.”