Coal to power on ‘but Newcastle port must change’

Port of Newcastle chair Roy Green declares gas a key transitionary fuel to support jobs and businesses.

Port of Newcastle chair Roy Green has warned against an ­immediate shift away from coal and declared gas as a key transitionary fuel to support jobs and businesses in the NSW Hunter ­region as thermal coal volumes “flatten out” over the next 15 years.

Amid a clash inside Labor over the future of coal and accusations from Hunter MP Joel Fitzgibbon that green activists had infiltrated the ALP, Professor Green said the world’s biggest coal export port would continue to export the ­resource as “long as there is a ­market”.

“But we also see what’s happening in terms of global trends in energy consumption and what that’s telling us is that … we’ll see some flattening out of coal volumes, in thermal coal not so much coking coal,” he said. “We have to take account of that in our future business plans and that means diversification and it means ensuring that we can do other things, in particular we want to build a container terminal which we are currently prevented from doing by the restriction that was applied in the privatisation process.”

Professor Green identified gas as a “transition fuel for hydrogen export and also domestic use”. He said the Port of Newcastle would not be an “unwilling bystander” when the shift from coal occurred, pointing to the success the Hunter region experienced following the closure of the BHP steelworks.

“We want to take advantage of what we call diversification because that gets across the point that we’re not just switching something off, and switching something on and then leaving a whole lot of people without jobs in the Upper Hunter,” he said.

Mr Fitzgibbon, who The Australian on Tuesday revealed had attacked the Labor Environment Action Network over its “fundamentalist” policies, said Labor had made a mistake in adopting a “certain religious zeal” in its environmental policies at the last two elections. The opposition resources spokesman said LEAN volunteers who were attending branch meetings and party events with green T-shirts were giving the party a bad image.

“Those green T-shirts, of course, represent the colour of choice of one of our main political opponents, the Australian Greens,” he told Sky News.

“Our main political opponents, the Liberal and National parties, have successfully portrayed the Labor Party as being too close to the Greens. Having a core group within our party, roaming around in green T-shirts, preaching the environmental gospel, only feeds into the narrative our political ­opponents are trying to build.

“We are trying to demonstrate that we are a much broader church than that, that we are ­focused on traditional industries and traditional jobs while at the same time seeing the opportunities in the newer, more modern parts of the economy, including the renewables sector.”

Greens leader Adam Bandt seized on Mr Fitzgibbon’s attack on LEAN and his argument the group had launched “pre-emptive” attacks on the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Act review and the Narrabri gas ­project. Attempting to wedge Labor, Mr Bandt said when a “shadow minister lines Labor up with the Liberals on climate, it is a recipe for the coal-fuelled collapse of civilisation”.

“Joel Fitzgibbon is the prospective minister for ­resources and when he channels Tony Abbott, he is also clearly advocating Labor’s position,” Mr Bandt said.