Earth to Aussies: We love your coal

The rest of the world wants Australia’s coal resources.

The last two weeks of war in Ukraine should have made one thing blindingly clear – the rest of the world wants our coal and gas, and is prepared to pay big dollars for them, even if we don’t want them.

Indeed, the rest of the world would happily want our oil as well, if we were prepared to let it be found.

The price of oil went past SUS135 ($182) Monday, dragging up prices for gas (LNG) with it – and, in due course, the price you pay at the pump.

The price of ‘inferior’ energy coal had already gone past $US400.

That’s ‘inferior’ compared to the higher quality and usually much higher priced met (coking) coal used in steel-making – albeit which can also be used in a power station, except that normally wouldn’t make much sense with so much, cheaper, energy coal around.

So, at the sharp end - keeping the lights on, at cheapest cost, bar nothing - energy coal isn’t really that inferior.

The already ‘interesting’ state of, keeping the lights on, play - albeit thankfully not yet an issue in Australia despite our ‘best efforts’ to make electricity unreliable, hard to get, and expensive - could get ‘very interesting’ if the west took the ‘next big step’ of sanctioning Russian oil and gas exports.

Although the financial sanctions can and clearly are making life very difficult inside Russia, the other sanctions so far imposed have been more about ‘show’ than ‘effect’. Oil and gas are altogether different matters.

There we are talking really big dollars – and getting bigger every day for Russia, as the oil and gas prices rocket.

We are also talking very big impacts – on Russia and on us.

Turning off Russian gas would quote literally send Western Europe dark and cold.

Trying to turn off Russian oil would require the forced closure of pipelines in adjacent countries and turning back oil tankers.

Both would send already sky-high prices into the stratosphere.

They would also be one very short step shy of any attempt to impose a ‘no-fly’ zone over Ukraine that would bring the west into direct – shooting - conflict with Russia.

Unless of course, Vladimir Putin ‘took the hint’ and instantly backed off Ukraine entirely.

Hmm.

The world still gets close to 85 per cent of all its energy from oil, coal and gas.

Make your own judgment on that happening.

Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars – indeed, it’s almost certainly already gone well into the trillions, plural - that have been poured into so-called renewables, the world still gets close to 85 per cent of all its energy from the three old reliables: oil, coal and gas, in that order.

Add on so-called biomass – mostly, the carbon dioxide emitting and real carbon grit expelling burning of dung and whatever in under-developed countries that really does pollute the atmosphere and kills hundreds of thousands of people a year – and close to 90 per cent of all energy in the world still comes from burning fossil fuels.

Something like 7-8 per cent comes from nuclear and the old, and truly reliable renewable, hydro: after those trillions of dollars, just 5 per cent or so from wind and solar.

Energy is the foundational input into everything that happens in the economy; it’s also the foundational input into everything that happens in our lives – from food, to ‘keeping the lights on’ to health care.

What has already happened to the prices of the real energy we use – oil, gas and coal – has locked in significant price rises over the year(s) ahead.

Even higher prices would be devastating, even though such higher prices would be a bonanza for Australian exporters.

It should certainly be the mother-of-call wake up calls on the sheer stupidity, the utter insanity, our ‘national suicide note’, in our rush to bury coal.