Gas expectations fuel hopes for clean power

A $500m fund will be on offer by the Newman government to develop and commercialise clean fuel alternatives.

BOC managing director Colin Isaacs, left, with Campbell Newman at the new LNG plant outside Chinchilla in central Queensland yesterday.

THE Newman government will offer a $500 million fund to ­develop and commercialise clean fuel alternatives as part of its plan to sell or lease its coal-fired power stations and electricity assets.

At the opening of the state’s first domestic liquefied natural gas plant, outside Chinchilla in central Queensland, Premier Campbell Newman said the government wanted to help move ­industry and agriculture into cleaner energy.

The $500m in assistance, to be funded by the proposed $34 billion sale and lease of government assets, to be put to voters at the next election, will be offered to ­researchers and industry to commercialise alternatives to ­carbon-based fuel. Mr Newman said the opening of the $200m BOC plant, which will produce 50 tonnes of LNG a day to be used for domestic manufacturing, mining and trucking, should herald a new way to fuel the sectors.

The plant is the first in Queensland to produce fuel for the Australian market and ­already is powering the Nestle and Buderim Ginger factories in southeast Queensland.

“Our state has vast energy ­resources, but instead of just ­exporting those reserves I want Queenslanders to find new ways of developing cleaner and greener fuels,” Mr Newman said. “If just a fraction of our trucking firms, mines and farms switched to ­domestically produced fuels, we would see more jobs for our kids and lower emissions, too.”

BOC executives and trucking companies plan to build LNG truck stops along the country’s east coast to convert the transport industry to the cleaner fuel. Trucks could travel for up to 700km without having to refuel with LNG.

BOC managing director Colin Isaac said the truck-stop plan represented a new era, with truck manufacturers now building the engines that use LNG.

“One of the things that slowed the conversation of the transport industry is the availability of suitable engines,’’ he said.

“So there are engine manufacturers that are making dual-fuel engines today … you’re immediately switching over to cleaner, greener, less noise pollution, less pollution.”

The president of anti-­coal-seam gas group Lock the Gate, Drew Hutton, said he was not ­opposed to the use of LNG for domestic purposes.

“It’s just a pity that we have to destroy the whole Surat Basin ... for an export industry that in the long run won’t suit Australia’s purposes at all,” he said.

“The concern I have about using gas for domestic purposes is that Australians are going to be paying three times as much for the gas as we should be, because it’s now going to be linked to the export price.”