Fearing a backlash from green voters in next year’s elections, the government of Australia’s second populous state Victoria has spiked a plan to allow mining and export of carbon-intense brown coal to India, media reports here said.
The state energy minister Peter Batchelor disclosed the decision after ‘The Age’ daily revealed that Melbourne-based Exergen was to launch a $1.5 billion coal export scheme and had paid for an exclusive meeting with premier John Brumby while the proposal was before the government.
Exergen wanted to mine, dry and export 12 million tonnes of brown coal a year to be burnt in Indian power plants.
A subsequent decision to deny Exergen an exclusive coal allocation has now been confirmed by a spokeswoman for Batchelor, Emma Tyner.
“The government has no plans to allocate coal to Exergen or to any other company outside of a competitive tender process,” she said, confirming that the government had no “immediate” plan to open coalfields for tender.
The Age had uncovered a cabinet document in October showing that a priority allocation of coal for Exergen was “imminent” and that a tender had been proposed for next year to allocate an extra 13 billion tonnes of coal.
The newspaper’s revelations, particularly about the export of coal to India, prompted criticisms that the state was putting commercial opportunity ahead of its responsibility to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
The Cabinet document acknowledged that community concerns could be raised by the export of brown coal, a relatively ‘dirty’ fuel that emits far more greenhouse emissions to generate power than most alternatives.
Education Minister Bronwyn Pike and Housing Minister Richard Wynne, who both face a growing green vote in their inner-suburban electorates, are believed to be among those cabinet members to have shown interest in the issue recently.
