Tony Peake

Our dependence on foreign oil supplies is our greatest economic and national security risk. We shouldn't be so exposed if we just used the massive energy resources we have. I wrote more in the Daily Telegraph yesterday - and full article below. --- Every day about 80 ships arrive in Australia with freight from overseas. About half of these ships, at least by weight, carry petrol, diesel and other fuels. Because of the Iran war we are getting a hard lesson on how vulnerable we are to this dependency. As hard as the next few months are likely to be it is far from the worst that we might face. This Middle East conflict is not one we are directly involved in. A conflict in the Pacific would put us in much more of a pickle. This week the Page Research Centre, a research body aligned with the Nationals Party, released a report on what we should do to prepare for the risk of conflict in our region. Their report's title highlights the issue, *All at Sea: Fuel, War, and Australia’s Achilles’ Heel*. The problem we have is that any potential adversary can tailor their strategy to cut our sea lanes and smoke us out. This strategy can be effective almost independent of the size of our oil stockpiles. While much of the debate has focused on why we don't have three months' worth of fuel, many sieges have lasted longer than that. Stockpiles can give us breathing space but they are not long term protection. Others have used this debate to push electric vehicles. Some adoption of electrification can help and I love electric vehicles. I would have already bought one but for the cost. There are two major issues with electric vehicles as a solution. First, we do not have enough electricity to service our current needs. Any major expansion of electricity demand cannot be filled by just renewable energy. We would need to build coal, gas and nuclear plants as well. Second, even if we convert our entire passenger car fleet to electric vehicles that would save just 30 per cent of our fuel demand. We can also use more biofuels to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, however, they too cannot supply most of our oil needs either. Australia should never find itself facing an energy crisis again. Australia has more energy resources per person than any country in the world except Saudi Arabia. However, 95 per cent of our energy is in coal and uranium, the two energy sources that the current Labor government refuses to use. Our incoming energy crisis is a choice, not a destiny. It is a choice imposed on us by a net zero obsessed government that has put the pursuit of unrealistic and unachievable global emissions targets above the national security of Australia. Our enormous coal reserves can be converted into oil. Coal to liquids technologies have been used at scale since World War II. South Africa today produces around 40 per cent of its liquid fuels from its coal reserves. China now converts around 400 million tonnes of coal to liquids every year. According to the Page Report we could get such technologies going in about a year. This crisis may end before that but this experience should be a massive wake up call because the next crisis might be much tougher for us. Change is coming. This week even the net zero obsessed Labor Government was forced to rush emergency legislation to subsidise the importation of petrol and diesel to Australia. So, the Labor Government, which has fought a war on fossil fuels for its first four years, has been reduced to desperately using taxpayer funds to support the overseas production of the same fossil fuels they have been saying we no longer need. The Labor Government refused to support our amendments, which would have unwound the prohibitions and restrictions, on the production of oil and gas in Australia, that Labor has inserted into federal law. So we now have the bizarre spectacle of an Australian Government supporting the creation of foreign oil and gas jobs in overseas countries, but the Australian Government won't support the creation of Australian oil and gas jobs in its own country. If it is a good thing to support the importation of fossil fuels from overseas, why is it not a good thing to support the production of fossil fuels here? Domestic production would reduce our dependency on foreign countries too. We are the only island nation in the world that is its own continent. With a continent full of resources we should not voluntarily put ourselves at risk of a modern day U-boat campaign on our shipping lanes. We are a land "girt by sea" but because "our land abounds in nature's gifts" we should never again be so dependent on others as we are now.