Latest updates: Pike River mine explosion Families and friends of the trapped miners are gathering outside the offices of Pike River Coal on Tainui St in Greymouth. Grey District Mayor Tony Kokshoorn is greeting and embracing some of those arriving. MORE IN... < NZ Herald >
Rescue team yet to enter West Coast mine - due to poisonous gas....more
Trapped miners rescue bid likely later today
Emergency services were tonight positioning personnel for a rescue bid to be mounted later today for the 27 people missing in the Pike Creek Coal mine 46km northeast of Greymouth.
Specialist mine rescue teams and emergency services will remain at the mine tonight as air quality testing continues....more
Dozens of NZ miners missing after blast
Tonight, a rescue operation is underway at the Pike River mine near the town of Greymouth. ......more
Commenting on the valid concerns brought to the public's attention by NSW GreensMP Cate Fraehrmann a Ms Glenda McLoughlin of Metgasco seeks to allay public concerns with the glib patter one has come to expect of Prime Minister Julia Gillards spin doctors.
"We consider that we are highly regulated by the NSW Department of Primary Industries," Ms McLoughlin said.
So who are Metgasco ? Judging by their board, they are merely a shirt worn by Esso which itself is a shirt worn by energy giant Exxon - Mobil -developers in conjunction with Chevron of the huge Gorgon Gasfield off the coast of Western Australia.
Not to put too fine a point on t
his statement, why is the Department of Primary Industries, which exists to promote business the appropriate licensing authority,yet lacking the expertise to assess or monitor ecological considerations. The DPI's administration of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act does seem akin to allowing the proverbial Fox to babysit the chickens or still in NSW, The Department of Communities to take responsibility for the appropriate care of children. As Ms Fraehmann correctly asserts, responsibility for Environmental Concerns should correctly be monitored by the Environment Department.
Other areas actively protesting Coal Seam Gas Mining:
The Effectiveness of Australia's State Territory and Federal Environmental Protection laws relating to extractive industries needs to be viewed in the context of the 2009 PTTEP Montara Oilspill disaster. Montara, a marine platform operation suffered a cataclysmic failure which resulted in loss of dr
illing rig and a three month oilspill which took 3 months to successfully plug.
A spill which polluted 24000 square kilometres. A spill which was accorded only cursory government monitoring, with the relevant governments concerned largely relying on well operator PTTEP for information. The Australian Governments ability to effectively monitor the effects of that spill may be laid bare in a report which Federal Minister Martin Ferguson has refused to release despite its presentation to him in June 2010. In terms of cleanup work, The Australian government seems content to acquit that exercise in the confines of a committee room and eventually on the floor of parliament- but not a scerrick of cleanup activity in the affected pristine Northwest Shelf area.
In Contrast, the BP Deepwater Horizon Gulf Oilspill for which BP America were castigated had a considerably higher degree of public scrutiny forced by intense media and activist scrutiny and a very concerned Louisianan governor @BobbyJindal supported by his very effective @GOHSEP unit. I am among the minority who take the view that despite a colossal error with fatal human and devastating environmental consequences, BP stuck around and still today take quite expensive measures to clean up their mess -at a substantial cost to that company, which has sold off sizable assets to pay for the operation.
The comparison is a stark illustration of the processes of monitoring and mitigation missing in the Australian extraction equation. Environmental Compliance adequacy, monitoring mitigation and prevention were proven to be inadequate at Montara as a hapless daisy chain of government agencies including scientists hamstrung by bureaucrats waited on disaster perpetrator PTTEP for information, which could have been as accurate as PTTEPs own physical, financial and legal constraints dictated. Were they? We don't know,because our Australian government failed to have adequate checks balances and preventive measures in place.
Our Australian governments lax pro-extractive laws not merely permit environmentally risky extraction processes, they virtually dictate that directors use risky processes or risk shareholder wrath at the unnecessary expense of safer technologies. The Australian Government received the report which they commissioned into the Montara Oilspill in July -but still choose not to release it while continuing backroom deals on new oil and gas exploratory and production licenses with the perpetrators of some of the worst ecological disasters this world has ever seen.
The "Clean Energy" Blindside :
The Government Coal and Gas Industries are keen to point out the relative merits of Gas vs Coal fired energy. Admittedly, there are emissions reductions. However, left completely out of the discussion is the BeyondZero option of renewable energy generation, which has a goal of zero emissions power generation in ten years.
Listen to the 2 videos below , compare and decide for yourself which option is cleanest.
Heres the Coal versus Natural Gas discussion by the Ontario,Canada Government...
versus the Australian developed Beyond Zero, zero emissions plan to capture renewable energy from wind and solar generation....
Update from James Price Point proposed Gas Hub site:
Despite assurances given to the leader of the aboriginal clans opposing the establishment of the proposed Gas Hub by Woodside that they would not attempt to occupy James Price Point prior to the group leaders return from Sydney, On Monday morning a Woodside/Hagstrom convoy attempted to do precisely that -move onsite.Trucks, drilling equipment, four wheel drives, large trucks with tanks and pumping systems, a semi trailer carrying two-tracked machines, water tanks, fire trucks and ambulance plus heaps of security personnel arrived at the Barred Creek Turnoff to be confronted (and turned away) by a small but committed group comprising mainly elderly women and babies.
Western Australian Premier Brumbys intention to compulsorily acquire the land "to create much needed aboriginal jobs" is a complete beatup. Local aboriginals already enjoy among the highest levels of employment in Australia.Many own their own businesses-in the tourism industry which could be irrepairably affected by the proposed Gas Hub.
If Woodside do not consider it necessary to act in good faith when dealing with the local community then they should expect that the local community would not want them to be there.
We need only look as far as the PTTEP Montara Disaster of 2009 to understand the possibility for UnderSea Oil and Gas Extractive processes to depart drastically from their operational optimum performance, becoming a major threat to the environment in places which are exceedingly difficult to measure or mitigate.
The Premier of Western Australia Colin Barnett has recently initiated processes designed to disposess the Kimberley Land Council of land which a consortium of some of the worlds major petroleum extractive companies wish to use to facilitate their multi-billion dollar gas hub designed to connect the massive Browse offshore Gasfield to their supply chain.
The Premier's aggressive and intimidatory stance against the moderately controlled KLC mirrors the cavalier treatment of Peru's indigenous peoples rights by that countrys President Pinera, whose government used police to massacre indigenous protesters in Bagua Peru in 2009. Premier Barnett's publicly issued statement of intent to commence compulsory acquisition proceedings "because of the premiers frustration with delays" is typical of the jackboot diplomacy Australian colonial governments have applied to Australia's indigenous people since arrival, pushing them roughly aside to serve other interest groups.In the case of the James Price Gas Hub, the interest group is a consortium almost exclusively made up of perpetrators of among the deadliest and most destructive petroleum extractive disasters in the country.
Who can forget BHP-Billiton's OK Tedi in remote Papua New Guinea as a bright example of corporate responsibility. BHP-Billiton are another partner.
Do I need find links to BP Americas Deepwater Horizon Gulf Oilspill?? To their credit they continue to mitigate.The overall process however exposed multiple layers of inadequacy in corporate and government systems, with multiple points of failure identified.
Australia needs to take heed of the lessons of Montara, which was never properly mitigated. Government silence and exhaustive parliamentary inquiries miss the point that not one drop of PTTEP oil was spilt on the floor of their committee room, and they are highly unlikely to find contamination there. However, as with the Deepwater Horizon Oilspill, vast underwater plumes were found after the US Government had declared that all the oil had "disappeared. The US Government was forced to restate its position. Following the successful Capping of Montara all monitoring and remediation stopped. We simply said out of sight out of mind and left our mess there. The PTTEP drilling rig is said to have been a cheaper to use, higher risk 30 year old technologically superceded model, which the company perhaps even had a duty to their shareholders to use in preference to the safer later and more expensive options. They were certainly entitled to use this dangerous dinosaur rig because Australias lax legal regime permitted them to.
Companies such as Chevron target jurisdictions with the weakest compliance regimes worldwide as providing the most profitable extractive options. Australia fits the bill perfectly
The reported $30billion plus fine on BP for the Gulf #Oilspill amounts to an elevated level of hypocrisy by the US.The fine appears to be imposed on top of cleanup costs and compensation payments.It may well impact BPs (or its insurers) ability to fund continued compensation, mitigation and cleanup operations.If it is fair and just that BP is to be so penalised then Chevron should also be hit even harder for the mess it continues to deny responsibility for in Ecuador.The ecovandalism there is intentional and has severely impacted the health and capacity to live for the primarily indigenous local population affected.Mitigation & reparations for this travesty calculated at $27billion now appear vastly under-calculated in the wake of Deepwater Horizon.Not forgetting Nigeria, where a virtual whose who of the oil mister bigs have effected spillages of the scale of Deepwater Horizon on a virtually annual basis. These are US and EU companies wilfully taking advantage of weak home legislation in the countries of extraction to continue to deploy archaic equipment and stone aged practices. These practices can be most effectively curtailed by 1st world nations penalising extractives for their international ecovandalism, taking responsibility as the consumer nation. Taking action against a company which has put its hand up and its wallet on the table as BP has done in the Gulf,while feigning ignorance of the unacceptable methods used globally is wrong,unethical and smacks of political expedience.
As with all things, there is a little bad,however good-there is a little good,however bad.
Oil spills of this magnitude are not a new thing.In fact,the fuel in your tank possibly comes from an area such as Nigeria,Ecuador or Peru where Oil companies don't have nearly the public scrutiny as is the case with the Deepsea Horizon Oilspill disaster. Or the fuel in the bus you caught today;perhaps it came from Trafigura, a major
oil broker which saw fit to dump its toxic waste from a questionable at-sea desalting operation around the Abidjan area.Did you see the Crude movie,about how Chevron subsidiary Texaco wilfully polluted an area the size of the State of Delaware,and,refusing to accept responsibility,are the respondents in a $US27billion lawsuit,the worlds largest.
Infamously,Alberta Canadas highly controversial and heavily ecologically destructive #Tarsands projects have polarised Canadians and people internationally.Venezuela has its own Tarsands project under development in the highly eco-sensitive indigenous peoples Orinoco River region.Statoil,owned by the clean green Norwegian Government,exploits deposits in Africa and Canada with not quite the care taken in their home North Sea operations.In Zimbabwe and other African countries there are the blood diamond mines.In Madagascar there is Huge allocation of native forest logging. Jaguarete of Brazil has logging operations in Paraguay which create farmland by destroying uncontacted peoples & rare wildlife habitat.
Last year,in ostensibly 1st world capitalist Australia, a Thai company called PTTEP hosted a devastating explosion on their #Montara well platform, triggering an eerily similar catastrophe to Deepwater Horizon-a catastrophe which took 3 long months to contain,and polluted 24,000 square kilometres of remote pristine North West Australian waters. The issues this catastrophe brought to light (lack of effective governance, lack of compliance monitoring, and the failure of extractive exploratory/process licensing to ensure adequate technological safeguards are in place PRIOR to the disaster) are compounded by a drawn out inquiry,still incomplete, and,forgotten, the apparent complete absence of any but the most cursory cleanup efforts. The pollution reached some areas of Indonesia. The Federal Australian Government has, apparently ignoring this ill managed disaster, last week granted further licenses,in the inshore Margaret River area. BP Deepwater Horizon 's Gulf Oilspill magnifies the issues which the world has not quite grasped;the magnitude of the human suffering and ecovandalism, whether intentional or accidental, one thousand fold.On the doorstep of the worlds media powerhouse, about as in your face as it could get. This is GOOD.In the first few days of the spill, Arnold Schwarznegger withdrew all offshore extractive licenses.President Obama reversed his stance and policies on offshore drilling,perhaps sparing the populous US East Coast and remote Alaskan Bering Sea a similar catastrophic event. BP,and the oil industry are under the glare of the spotlight as they would never have wished for,but not in a good
way.
One year ago tomorrow,in Peru,indigenous protesters,supported by indigenous organisation AIDESEP,were massacred by Police while protesting against the exploration of their indigenous areas,lands which they have had custodianship.The exploration was consented to by the non, and many say anti-indigenous,pro extractive Peruvian government of President Pinera.This deeply disturbing incident is one of the better publicised arbitrary use of state power to brutally enforce the short term commercial gain of foreign extractives,over the interests of local,and particularly indigenous people.Not to mention the flora,fauna and ecosystems whose living components have no direct voice in the often corrupt consultative processes. These extractive operators are not solely to blame,nor are the governments whose political tenure is seen to be strengthened by "sound economic performance.There are current mining issues in Papua New Guinea,Guinea, Kazakhstan, and I am just informed'our suspicions are confirmed for war torn Darfur,Sudan.
As businesses,communities and individuals we use these polluting fossil fuels and lubricants in ways which are difficult to completely do away with, easier though to use less of. The pollution is as much about our immediate environment, but moreso, about sustainable equitable partnerships, between all parties,human cultural or ecological.We must ensure that those aspects within our capability to address,are addressed.
As authorities and governments responsible to communities for oversight of extractive operations,distribution and monitoring,more can and should be done in the countries which have the greatest wealth,but much can be done in those countries lacking economic scale.Because control is with the consumer,the consumer countries and authorities are best positioned to implement a chain of responsibility regime which ensures sustainability and Fair Pay without humanrights violation, using worlds best practice technology and implementation,with effective disaster mitigation in place(or readily available) prior to commencement.
As companies, Extractive Process Operators,especially mining oil gas and logging Contractors and chain solutions providers must better co-ordinate their work and technologies to ensure that the practices of the past stay in the past,that there is a future for extractives, oh,and the rest of us.
There is widespread concern across a broad spectrum of the Australian community concerning the Rudd Labor Governments Mining Super profits tax.
Unionists have voiced concerns relating to job losses.Industry Giants have shelved hundreds of millions of dollars worth of expansion plans, which by some estimates would have generated 30,000 jobs.
Offshore, investors across a broad spectrum of industries are re-rating Australia as a capital destination, with good reason. The mining industry apparently had no prior warning of the proposed introduction of the Mining Tax. Major mining players were treated like schoolboys by a rather inept Federal Government under the guise of negotiations.
Revelations today (23 May 2010) by Treasurer Wayne Swan that miners in fact pay a concessional tax rate - just half of other businesses, begs the question of why this is so, how this concession came about, and why Miners tax rates should not reflect that of any other business.
There are further issues raised though, than have been widely canvassed.
The vexing issue for us is why this tax is not being applied across all extractive industries. Serial polluter Chevron has announced that it is staking its future on the Northwest Shelf Gorgon Gas deposit. Other energy players are at developmental stages of oil and gas extractive processes in the region. Why are they not taxed similarly? Why not banks, whose excessive profits are generated using methods which do perhaps as much social and environmental harm as extractives.
There is the additional concern that while Rudd Labor is prepared to impose this tax, they insist on giving the proceeds over to benefit the government pampered baby boomer generation. In contrast, Norway (when oil was discovered) nationalised, formed Statoil to extract, and had funds diverted to a future fund which benefit all future generations of their people. This would be a welcome use of such a windfall tax.
We have not heard from the Rudd Government on the issue of strengthening extractive eco management responsibility obligations for extractive industries. The Montara #oilspill last year graphically illustrated the lax legislation companies such as Atlas Rig site operator PTTEP could operate under. There is also the issue of independent monitoring by government or non-government bodies. Given the flow of information from Montara,largely repeated by the Australian Government from statements by PTTEP, one is entitled to conclude that monitoring is less than perfect. I suspect,in practical terms,non existent.
The uncertainty created in the minds investors, industry players workers and the international investment community is not salved by Opposition Leader Tony Abbott's promise to repeal the Mining Super Tax-- the day after he stated that he exaggerates and that we the public shouldn't believe everything he says.Who do you believe??
Lost amidst all the jockeying to be seen to be the Baron of clean & green is the fact that 11 workers souls were lost in the Gulf Oil Tragedy. We offer our condolences and support to those families concerned, and ask extractive workers worldwide to consider the safety of themselves and others at their worksite. Workers who have reason to believe that an action or omission may result in personal or environmental injury or catastrophe have not only the right, but the responsibility of duty of care, to refuse to carry out such actions or emissions, and where necessary prevent those acts or omissions being carried out by others- whatever the consequences may be.
In the aftermath of the widely reported PTTEP Montara oil spill last year,and the BP Gulf oilspill unfolding now, we have immediate unquestionable clarity on 2 points.
In both cases, the companies concerned were unable to immediately and effectively respond to catastrophic failures of their systems. Neither company had a strategy to deal efficiently with the disaster.In PTTEP - Montara's case, the environmental damage covered 24,000 square kilometres of pristine ocean (imagine if fish could file lawsuits), and took three long months to bring under control. BP America & the US Government have no clear strategy to deal with the current Gulf disaster. BP are building "a structure" to hopefully capture & contain the oil for pumping -but could take 3 weeks.Or they are exploring the Montara option, which could take 3 months.
Both situations point to widespread systemic failures across multiple layers of government at State and Federal levels. The public have every right to expect that their governments will ensure that any extractive processes are carried out with maximum Safety and Environmental protection in place and ready to be implemented from day 1. Why does BP need 3 weeks to build a "Containment Structure". Why isn't one available on the Gulf Coast? Theirs is not the only oil rig in the area.All Governments must support worker monitoring of safety on extractive sites over company self regulation.Company self regulation decisions are too often subservient to profit motives, a powerful driver.
The local people and wildlife of new extractive exploratory areas such as the Bering Sea, or East Africa, where legislation is likely to be weak or non existent deserve the same protections 1st World countries demand for their own regions. USA EU and other trade blocks must boycott imports which cannot meet sustainable chain of responsibility requirements, and place such onus on their countrys own extractive industries. Countries of particular note are Canada, Australia, USA , UK in no particular order...
Countries with extractive processes, whether mining or oil/gas, whether onshore/ offshore must ensure that their environmental and safety legislation adequately addresses catastrophic failure, as is the case in both of these situations- and that such legislation is supported by appropriate and current technologies capable of immediate successful response- or don't start exploring / extracting
