Galilee Basin projects ‘unviable’
The Brisbane Times (17.11.14) reports the Newman Government will back Galilee Basin projects with infrastructure spending. However, ‘the Director of Energy Resource Studies Australasia at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), Tim Buckley, has said that this a financially irresponsible decision, and labelled the Galilee Basin projects “unviable”. “Many would consider this a Government simply pissing taxpayers’ money up against the wall,” he said in a statement. “The people of Queensland and Australia should be outraged at this idea of questionable politicians spending many billions of tax payer dollars to make an unviable, unwanted and dangerous mega coal project a reality. The Galilee coal projects are totally commercially unviable. Any project undertaken is highly likely to end up as a stranded fossil fuel asset as the rest of the world rapidly transitions to lower carbon solutions. Coal has entered structural decline – there is no two ways about that fact.”‘