The same people who promoted intermittent energy
(wind and solar) have trumped that with their latest green energy fad –
hydrogen fuel.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe; it fuels the sun and is
the third most common element on Earth. But it is so reactive that it is seldom
found in its elemental state - it combines strongly with other elements such as
oxygen to form water or with carbon to form methane. It is an essential
component in all acids, alkalis, hydro-carbons and organic materials.
To extract hydrogen from natural compounds such as water, methane or coal
requires very large inputs of energy. Most commonly hydrogen is produced from
methane gas using heat and steam, or by electrolysis of water using large
quantities of electricity.
Hydrogen can be used to power rockets, cars and engines of all types. However
the energy used to produce the hydrogen can never be fully recovered from the
energy in the hydrogen. It is thus NOT a source of energy – it is merely a
storehouse for energy - a battery.
It is possible to produce hydrogen from water using electricity from nuclear or
hydro-carbon fuels, or even intermittent green energy. The hydrogen gas could
then be transported to cities as a clean energy source for cars, thus reducing
pollution from petrol/diesel vehicles.
But hydrogen is a very dangerous gas. It has tiny lightweight molecules which
have low energy density and are difficult to compress, contain and store. It
also forms an explosive mixture with air. To provide a network of hydrogen
car-fuelling stations, or to suggest hydrogen as a domestic gas, is inviting
explosive disasters in the suburbs – (imagine the Health and Safety
regulations!)
Inviting
explosive disasters in the suburbs? https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=MMB2VR0087w
Even the impractical electric cars have benefits compared to the hydrogen car.
Electricity is safer and the supply network is easier and essentially in place.
Moreover, electric cars do not reduce the oxygen content of city air - every
tonne of hydrogen fuel consumes eight tonnes of oxygen to produce nine tonnes
of water vapour. So instead of urban smog, we may get urban fog.
And to suggest that hydrogen can provide base-load power tops all green energy
idiocy.
The Climate Change Authority wants Australians
to cut their production of carbon dioxide to 19% below 2000 levels by the year
2020.
The climate boffins should employ a demographer before they set such
unrealistic goals.
The population of Australia in 2000 was about 19 million and it is now 23
million. By 2020 it will probably be over 25 million.
If Australia’s production of carbon dioxide was merely frozen at the 2000
level, that would require a 24% reduction per head of population by 2020.
If we add to that a real reduction in total emissions of 19% by 2020, emissions
per capita would need to fall by 39% in just 6 years.
Cartoonist Steve Hunter
Even more unbelievable, China (supported by the
UN/IPCC) thinks that developed countries “need to cut emissions by 40% from
their 1990 levels by 2020”. This would require Australia’s per capita emissions
to fall by 60% to just 40% of their 1990 levels. All achieved within the next
six years.
Nothing real gets produced or done without generating carbon dioxide. Every
working car, truck, tractor, dozer, quad bike, boat, helicopter, bulk carrier
and aeroplane generates carbon dioxide. None of these will be powered by
wind-mills, sunbeams or nuclear power in the next six years. How will they
force us to use 39% less of them – carbon ration cards?
Making steel, bricks, cement, bitumen, minerals, metals, food, fertilisers and
roads produces carbon dioxide - shall we each use just 61% of what we did in
2000?
Humans, cattle, sheep, pigs, barbeques, champagne and beer also emit carbon
dioxide – shall we ration these too?
And Australian trains, lifts, supermarkets, operating theatres, refineries and
power stations will not keep working 24/7 without base-load electricity from
coal and gas, both generating carbon dioxide. Who is volunteering for living
with brown-outs, blackouts or irregular “Earth Hours” for about four months of
the year?
There is one way to achieve these goals – “The Tasmanian Solution”. Send 40% of
our remaining industry to Asia, and convert Australia into a quiet green utopia
of genteel poverty. This should create sufficient unemployment and reduced
consumption to achieve the required emissions austerity.
Is the Climate Change Authority engineering an emissions target depression to
achieve its savage cuts, or is this just another mindless model-driven target?
We should demand to see their detailed plans for achieving these targets.
Carbon dioxide is hugely beneficial for all plant life, and its effect on
global temperature is tiny and probably beneficial for most people. There is no
evidence that carbon dioxide causes extreme weather. Man-made Climate Policy is
a far greater and more certain danger than Man-made Climate Change.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the tide has turned in the war on carbon. Global
warming stopped seventeen years ago; the carbon price collapsed a year ago; the
EU is backpedalling on its disastrous green energy gamble; Russia, China,
India, Japan, Canada, USA, Brazil and South Africa will not sign any binding
Kyoto agreement; China has plans to build 160 new coal fired power stations in
the next four years; and Tim Flannery has been sacked.
Calculations for those who wish to
check:
Climate Change Authority Targets:
Year
Population
(Million)
Emissions
Total
Emissions
per head
Index
emissions per head
2000
19
100 (say)
5.26
100
2020
25
100
4.00
76 (24% reduction)
2020
25
81 (19% reduction)
3.24
61 (39% reduction)
China/UN IPCC Targets:
Year
Population
(Million)
Emissions
Total
Emissions
per head
Index
emissions per head
1990
17
100 (say)
5.88
100
2020
25
60 (40% reduction)
2.4
41 (59% reduction)
Viv Forbes,
RosewoodQldAustralia forbes@carbon-sense.com Viv Forbes is a science graduate, mineral economist,
financial analyst, farmer, Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition and has spent
a lifetime studying the primary industries and the weather of Australia. If you would like to read more see:
High speed rail travel could begin by 2035: but the plan comes with a price tag of $114 billion. shutterstock
East coast Australian cities could one day be linked by high speed rail, but with a price tag of $114 billion and a 40 year timeframe, according to a study released by the Transport Minister Anthony Albanese.
Under the plan announced today, the 1,748 kilometre network – including 144 kilometres of tunnels – will be completed in stages, linking Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.
The Sydney to Canberra section would be completed in 2035. The last stage, linking the Gold Coast and Newcastle, will be finished in 2058.
The analysis is the second phase of a strategic plan announced in 2010.
The government says despite the large price tag, high speed rail is viable, estimating the network will attract 40% of intercity air passengers by 2065, with 83.6 million passengers expected per year.
We put it to the experts: it’s a long time to wait, and it will cost a lot. Is high speed rail worth it?
Matthew Burke, Senior Research Fellow, Griffith University
The report estimates between 40-60% aviation passengers will transfer to rail. I’m not entirely sure that’s achievable.
If you’re in Coffs Harbour trying to get to Sydney, high speed rail makes sense. A travel time between Sydney and Canberra of an hour down from four makes that a very competitive service.
In a world where oil reserves are constrained, aviation gas may become much more expensive and there may be differences between relative costs. Under those scenarios high speed rail might stack up.
It would make sense to agree and preserve a corridor and plan for a future system but to commence construction only when it’s financially viable.
Should we be doing high speed rail at this point in time with Australian cities the size they are? On a world scale they’re pretty small, the distances between them a very large, and the cost to link them up is enormous.
At the very lowest the cost of high speed rail between Newcastle and Brisbane could be $20 billion, and as high as $40 billion. For $20 billion you could give Brisbane its cross river rail project. You could give the Sunshine Coast its first ever fixed public transport network. You can quadruple the size of the light rail on the Gold coast, and you could still have $10-30 billion left over.
A significant portion of the use that’s projected is for daily commuters who would come from ‘lifestyle’ cities on the outskirts of Sydney and Melbourne travelling to the major centres. These would become the most subsidized commuters in the history of Australian urban settlement. And I’m not sure you could call that travel sustainable even if it’s by rail.
Rico Merkert, Senior Lecturer in Aviation Management, University of Sydney Business School
This is not a new phenomenon. We have seen huge programs in Western Europe: in Spain, France, Germany, even the UK now has a high speed train program connecting London with the North of England. Japan, China and Taiwan do too. At some point we will see high speed trains in Australia. It’s just a question of how soon and at what cost.
It does require informed debate given the large cost and huge up-front investment.
The money could always be spent elsewhere. It would, however, at least in my view, be money well spent, with benefits of $2.30 per $1 spent. Many people will argue that these estimates are optimistic. Construction costs are likely to go up, but still it will still be sensible to look into this more seriously.
There will be quite a lot of demand, particularly on the east coast with Brisbane, Sydney, and Canberra. Sydney to Melbourne is currently the fifth busiest airline route in the world. Brisbane to Sydney is not far behind. There’s quite a lot of potential here as a high speed train could get you from Sydney CBD to Melbourne CBD in under three hours. That’s quite an interesting proposition for a lot of business travellers.
It will be an alternative to airlines. It won’t replace air traffic, because it’s still a lot faster to travel via air. But some travellers based right in the city centre next to the train station might find the offer attractive. In terms of service levels they’re similar to a flight. If the government is not prepared to subsidise these train operations then the prices for these train trips will be slightly higher than those on a [air] carrier (most certainly if it is a low cost carrier, such as Jetstar).
Peter Newman, Professor of Sustainability, Curtin University
The high speed rail system in Japan was started after the first oil crisis. We’re now up to the fourth or fifth. The European system has developed along those lines as well. You cannot continue to see a future where more and more oil is used. Some countries have made a serious effort to get off it.
I welcome any studies about getting people out of cars and planes and making a more sustainable transport system. If it’s electric it’s potentially much easier to link into the renewable energy system. We’ve got to get off oil especially diesel.
We’ve got to be serious about this, and I wonder how serious it is to propose a project that will cost $114 billion.
I’ve been looking at rail construction costs the past few years and getting more and more angry at how they have ballooned, which is due to unnecessary risk management.
This proposal seems to be beyond any realistic cost to build. Yet we built the southern railway in Perth for $17 million per kilometer. It had tunnels and bridges, overpasses and is essentially high speed rail at 130 kilometre per hour. I understand the high quality track requirements but these numbers seem too high to me.
Phillip Toner, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, University of Sydney
Everyone is in favour of more public transport. But there are a lot of other cheaper, intermediate options. Things like tilt trains that travel quite fast, they require relatively minor modifications to existing rail networks. These trains could cut travel time between urban centres by half.
Even in terms of transport, there a plenty of really high priority options such as improving the freight rail network between Melbourne and Brisbane, and Melbourne to Perth. That’s an absolute priority to get trucks off the road and significantly reduce pollution.
Something would have to happen with air traffic too. While you can get return airfares from Sydney to Melbourne for $100 that is a cheap option. Pollution generated by air traffic is a major problem now, but in the future they could be running on renewable energy. By the time they start working on fast train there will probably be developments in renewable energy such as the introduction of algae-based biofuel.
I can’t help think that the whole thing is to make the government look visionary and nation building. It’s hard to see the case for it considering cheaper options. You’ve just got to consider what else you can do with that sort money, such as investment in Gonski, higher education and the Australian science and technology base.
As the flood
waters started to ease and a stocktake started on the damage caused by ex-cyclone
Oswell that travelled down near the entire length of the Queensland coastline
and well into New South Wales, two regular print columnists published articles
on the 31st January calling a visionary and practical approach of
looking to how we can reduce the impact of natural disasters in the future.
Andrew Bolt
wrote an article, Nation must learn from natural disasters, where he
concentrates on towns and cities that flood regularly, where a lot of money is
spent of repairing after a flood and helping people to get back on their feet
but little spend on prevention measures such as levy banks.
Personally I don’t believe that all can be solved by
levies or dykes as in Bolts nation of origin, Holland. Historically towns had
to build down close to a major source of water; these days we have the means of
moving the water to the houses. I don’t believe that in locations of high flood
risk that sometimes the cost of constructing a big enough levies for the worst
of floods would be far greater than shifting the people out of the worst
impacted streets.
Senator Barnaby Joyce wrote in his weekly column in The
Canberra Times, Acts ofGod, but not much remedial action in Parliament, where he made some very good
points about Australia’s transport and communication networks and their current
inability to cope with natural disasters.
Cartoon thanks to Broelmann
"The
major infrastructure corridors along the coast are again under pressure or cut.
The Telstra fibre providing the communication link for north Queensland was cut
because of flooding.
The
justifiable focus on the current problem of flooding should be accompanied by a
long-term solution to alleviate some of the problem.
The
course of innovation is not lineal, it is more chaotic, but in the period of
this government there has been no plan that has dealt with the year-in,
year-out problems of floods, congestion and safety of moving goods along the
same corridor as people, along the coast. It should not be a surprise any more
that somewhere between Cairns and Melbourne at some point in summer there will
be a flood, and generally at many points along the coast.
We
need an educational system that does not leave Australia falling behind our
Asian neighbours. More than two sealed roads from east to west across our
nation would be very 21st century if we could manage it. We should plan to
develop our nation's north so we evolve from the southern crescent economy of
Lachlan Macquarie's day to one that can make the most of Asian middle class
opportunities. The capacity to move product on long haul rail from our second
biggest city, Melbourne, direct to our nation's third biggest, Brisbane, should
have happened years ago"
