Speeches

WT05/2003
20 May 2003

The Hydrogen Economy: and the Tidal Energy Link

Broome, Western Australia

My thanks to Mr Barry Haase MP, the Member for Kalgoorlie, for the kind introduction. May I also acknowledge the presence of Mr Ian Macfarlane MP, Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources. My thanks, also to all the scientific community, from across the world, who have chosen to be present at this particular conference. It has been something that Barry and I and others have worked hard to create, and the Federal Government appreciates the effort you have made to be here in Broome today.

I thank, in particular, those people who have addressed us and the knowledge they have brought to our attention. I am deeply grateful and I hope my contribution will add to that situation. As Barry has just inferred, I am the salesman and unashamedly so for tidal power, and I am here today to put the case for tidal power within the hydrogen economy.

The Howard Government invited speakers from Iceland, the United States of America, Germany, France and Australia to address the 160 fully paid registered delegates who are in attendance.

I am pleased to see that those delegates include leading Australian scientists, as well as small and large business operators. I am further delighted at the extent to which small business is accepting the opportunities and challenges involved.

I am further delighted at the extent to which small business is accepting the opportunities and challenges involved.

Australias Chief Scientist, Dr Robin Batterham, has chaired all sessions and I wish to thank him. I am sure he too has gained considerably from his involvement.

The spokesman from Iceland, Professor Thorsteinn I Sigfusson informed us of his countrys completion of the worlds first Hydrogen Service Station and their plans for the propulsion of all their vehicles and extensive fishing fleet with hydrogen.

The representative from BMW advised of the progress they have made, and that they would be marketing dual hydrogen and petrol vehicles in the near future. Further, they have formed a joint venture with competitor General Motors, to refine transportation and dispensing technology associated with this product.

BMW has already reduced the time taken to recharge a cars hydrogen tank from 3 hours to 3 minutes.

Speakers from the US have informed us of the words of President Bush, associated with his announcement of $ US 1.2bn in additional hydrogen research funding, that a child born, as he spoke, would drive a hydrogen car on obtaining their licence (presumably at 16 years of age).

I am advised the Prime Minister of Japan is currently driving a car fuelled by hydrogen.

This conference highlights the technological challenges, at every step, to deliver this known technology at affordable prices. It consequently highlights the opportunities for Australia to lead and participate in those achievements.

The speakers have all corrected the myths of the dangers of hydrogen compared to conventional fuels.

The world is now addressing the various processes by which to produce hydrogen. Many include the splitting of hydrocarbons. But a fundamental of physics is that one cannot destroy an Element, thus raising the question of what to do with the remaining carbon.

There is consequently an advantage in the harvesting of tidal power and the capacity to use the electrical energy generated to first electrolyse water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then to liquefy the hydrogen ready for direct transfer to shipping for delivery to Sydney or Tokyo.

If all things were equal, Australia is endowed with all the hydrocarbons it needs well into the future. They are very conveniently located to where people live and where many of our other industrial resources, requiring energy, exist. But the rules are changing and we have this massive world debate about greenhouse emissions, and we would be unwise to think we can ignore it.

I support whole heartedly the Howard Governments position in regards to the Kyoto solution and could spend all my speech telling you the reasons for that. Put simply, I am deeply concerned about empowering third parties through international conventions to tell us how to run our country or our energy policy. We do not need that; we just need to go forward.

In accepting the existence of that problem, we are confronted of course with the practical solutions that we might provide.

Barry Haase has made the point that I had also written for myself. When one looks at the challenges that have been successfully confronted, historically within this State of Western Australia, we start with the problem confronting, in the early 1890s, the Premier at the time of Federation, Sir John Forrest.

His problem was that people had gone nearly 600kms into the desert and found very large quantities of gold in an area that is still producing very large amounts of gold. His problem was of course that out in the eastern goldfields, in order to develop that gold mining industry you needed potable water and there was none. Somebody had to pipe that water 557 kilometres. The solution was to build the longest single fresh water pipeline in the world. Added to this was the fact that they did not have arc welders and they did not have people who could manufacture cylindrical pipes, off a production line. In those days they bought them in two halves and riveted them together, and they leaked like a sieve. Thus the first stage of the technology needed, developed in Australia, was a thing called a locking bar, as shown in the accompanying diagram.

They stuck both edges in and squeezed them together and it worked. Yet of course, the then Australian media attacked that innovative technology and the overall project with venom. Consequently, as Barry Haase points out, the engineer C.Y OConnor eventually took his life. Additionally, the Premier, John Forrest had to go and borrow from British lenders his entire annual budget an amount that sounds so ridiculous today; two and a half million pounds to build 557 kms of pipeline. In the end it was an engineering project that exceeded by any measure, given the circumstances of the time, flying a man to the moon some eighty years later.

Then in the early 1980s, another Premier of Western Australia had a problem. People had gone out and found the North West shelf natural gas deposit. Nobody wanted to develop it, because there were no customers. So the Premier put Western Australias finances on the line once again, with a $1.2 billion dollar investment to build the gas pipeline, and entered into a take or pay contract for sufficient gas to make the offshore development viable.

Yet many criticised it at the time. We know what that investment is delivering to Australia today.

So here we are today; we have got to find new energy resources. We cannot wait for the world to show us how. Therefore, the challenge is before the Ians and the Wilsons and the John Howards to do something about it, and my plea today is that we take the challenges that others have taken before us. Today, I am here to ask people to know and understand that we have not got a problem. We just have a challenge.

That challenge is to harness the tides of the Kimberley. When you get up there, and you see waves four and five (old-fashioned feet) high, one or two metres of water just trying to catch up with itself, you realise the energy potential. If you are going to harvest tidal power, you need supportive topography, and while the Australian coastline is typically straight, with a few bays, the Kimberley region is the exception. It has got everything needed to allow us to consequently harvest those tides.

So, in a climate for change, what do we do?

In my early stages of trying to sell this idea to my Prime Minister, I prepared this poster, to show how you would bring it all together from my laymans perspective.

As part of that, we went to CSIRO and we said well, what does it all mean in some pictorial sense?

The bar graph colours of course, tell it all.

You can look at the light blue and see total Australian energy consumption.

You can look at the yellow and see the total Australian electricity consumption, which is a fraction of that total.

You can look at the purple, and it says Kimberley tidal power, which equals total energy consumption

But the one colour bar, I want to draw your attention to, is that depicting the energy produced by the Snowy Mountains Scheme, which is barely a pencil line. Yet its construction was a major effort, and which in my view was infinitely more difficult than harnessing the tidal power of the Kimberleys, where we need no tunnels, no high level dams and no permanent prevention of water flows.

Other speakers here at the Broome conference have estimated tidal electricity costs in large-scale production, of 2 cents per unit.

The French have continued to produce tidal energy at La Rance for 40 years and are yet to conduct major maintenance on the generators involved.

So we have got all sorts of options, and let me say if we are going to confront the world and demonstrate ourselves as leaders, we should be taking the quantum leap, by-passing all intermediate solutions for fear of being left behind.

I do not think Australia can afford incremental growth, we are too small. By the time we establish it, everyone else will have moved on. So the question is what is the quantum leap?

TIDAL POWER GREENHOUSE WITH GRUNT

I see it as hydrogen generated and liquefied with Tidal Energy. However, I do not see hydrogen or hydrogen generated by tidal power as the death of the hydrocarbon industry. To the contrary, I see it as the saviour, in fact a partner to deliver longevity.

Because we do not have to achieve, and certainly nobody else in the world is going to achieve, zero emissions. We should be just targeting a component of our emissions, which would give us a lead on the rest of the world. In this I talk of replacing our present fuel of mobility, in the transport sector, thus removing a huge chunk from Australias carbon emissions.

I am the first to admit, as has been pointed out throughout our conference, that there are technical difficulties. I do not believe they are nearly half as large as those confronted by poor old C.Y OConnor, trying to build the worlds longest continuous water pipeline with virtually picks and shovels. Having to devise a new way of stopping the pipes from leaking because no one knew how to cast a round pipe.

So, why are we panicking today? The basic technology exists at every level, refinement and financing is the challenge.

The other factor that really concerns me is that there are no major financial managers here today at this conference, highlighting the culture of those fund managers. They are still of the view that they will be able to declare all sorts of artificial profits, in the future, by gambling on the stock market. That culture works on the principle that you will always find someone tomorrow who is more stupid than you are today. Why do we need that? We are shipping money out of this country for want of a place to spend it, whilst long term investments are ignored.

Let me take you back to the tidal/hydrogen plan. That is where we can spend our compulsory super, and the point has been made, if you are in the line of business that is providing someone with a pension, why would you not invest in a project, that when developed, produces massive profits. Tidal Energy Australia has to borrow money. They have got to borrow from the very people who should be investing in it. It is just fundamental of how we have to bring science, engineering and money together. The fuel of tidal power, and consequently hydrogen is money. As I have already noted, money is desperately looking for somewhere to go in our country. Tidal power investment is the answer.

So these are the issues. This is, if you prefer the politics. We have got to develop our options. It does not matter that there will be other options for low emission energy production or hydrogen creation. But if we are going to maintain our standard of living, and we accept as I do, the principle that we need new less emitting fuels, then we have got to have Greenhouse with Grunt.

The response cannot be Mickey Mouse, resulting in a high permanent cost. In Australia we have the answer . I am delighted that a number of our visitors have come out and actually sat there in a seaplane, and seen what our tidal energy is like. When you are forced to run the plane engine on half speed to stop sliding through the rocky gaps - the horizontal waterfalls - that is real energy.

The challenge is now before us - how much of the action do we require? What are our opportunities to be part of the action? We have got the resource. So how does Australia exploit it? What part of the hydrogen fuel cycle do we want to deliver?

We already supply mag wheels to many parts of the world. Are we going to invent the one that has the electric motor included?

I am a bit astounded might I say, at drawings I saw yesterday of an electric bus, and it has still got a single electric motor. In other words, feeding the wheels through a differential. Why would you maintain a differential and gearboxes and all those sorts of things? They are inefficient and of course they are heavy. Surely that is the challenge, someone needs to be looking at it in vehicle design.

So in summary, we do not need to close down our coalmines. Although, I am a little suspicious of geo-carbon sequestration, pumping the nasties back into the soil. I think that will create some problems for us. But why bother pursuing such technology to save the Coal Industry, when hydrogen and the tides can save it? I do not believe any nation is going to achieve zero emissions and I do not believe Australia has to be the conscience of the world.

But I would like to think we could lead the world in percentage terms and I believe that if we focus on the transport sector, and let me say that extends to a locomotive. With all the carrying problems that will apply to smaller vehicles, if you are on a set of rails, you just tow a tank of hydrogen behind you. It is when you get to the motor car that you have got a few problems. In transition, we can combine natural gas with hydrogen, so that it is a better product, and of course extend the life of those resources. They are all practical solutions.

The transport sector represents approximately 15% of Australias emissions. A conversion of that sector to hydrogen utilising the tidal energy link would put our nation to the forefront of the world whilst maintaining the efficiencies of the coal and natural gas sector to provide our base load electrical needs.

There is nothing that we cannot do, associated with tidal power and hydrogen.

My vision, having been out there with a number of the international delegates to this conference, to King Sound and Walcott Inlet twice in the last three days is probably something like a big oil and gas production platform. Down the bottom are the generators, in the middle is the hydrogen electrolysis plant, and at the top the liquefication plant pumping straight from nearby storage into a ship that has just pulled up alongside. Now I do not know if that is good idea but I hope that as a result of this Broome International conference, people will go away and say, how would I do that?

We have got the tidal energy resource, it is remote from where we would like to use it immediately, but the fact of life is, I believe we can defeat the technical problems, as have my political predecessors over the last century.

So I thank you for the information you have brought to this conference.

I thank you for your commitment. That is why you are all here.

I say to those who think they might be here to defend their corner of the market, that these energy sources are complimentary and what is more, the development of a hydrogen economy would defend our consumption of hydrocarbons. So do not think that we need to start chopping the energy cake into little bits.

I believe hydrogen is the answer and I equally believe the answer is liquefied hydrogen generated from the energy source that is renewable, inexhaustible and of course replaceable. For those who would remember, there is a childrens story about The Magic Pudding. It was a pudding, if you cut a slice out of it in the morning, it would grow back by lunchtime. That is the hydrogen economy with the tidal link.

The Howard Government not only understands the greenhouse threat but it has now set the scene for Australia to be a major player in providing a solution for the world in confronting climate change.

Thank you very much for coming to Broome for this vital conference.

The Hydrogen Economy: and the Tidal Energy Link - PDF version (5.1MB)