QRC concerned for coal

An internationally-funded campaign to shut down Queensland’s export coal industry was relying on exaggeration and misrepresentation in a bid to undermine regional communities, the Queensland Resources Council (QRC) told a conference in Brisbane.
Delivering the keynote address to the Galilee Basin Coal and Energy Conference, QRC Chief Executive Michael Roche said increasingly hysterical claims by environmental activist groups such as Greenpeace were attempting to drive a wedge into regional Queensland.
“Regional communities understand their long-term prosperity relies on the economic diversity that the minerals and energy sector is delivering,” Mr Roche said.
“However, it is clear that environment activists, led by Greenpeace, have no interest in the future of these communities, particularly when you learn that seed funding for their latest anti-coal campaign came from the United States.’”
Mr Roche said alarmist predictions by Greenpeace of more than 11,000 coal ships moving through the Great Barrier Reef area by 2020 had been dismissed as fanciful by recent independent studies presented to state and federal governments.
“These show that, under the most optimistic forecasts from all coal port operations in Queensland, coal shipping volumes by 2020 are more like 4200 – or 37 per cent of the Greenpeace claim,” said Mr Roche.
“The federal government’s Bureau of Resource and Energy Economics (BREE) is projecting Queensland coal exports by 2020 of between mid-range of 301 million tonnes to a high-range 327 million tonnes.
“Yet, Greenpeace is continuing to prosecute a ludicrous estimate that the state’s coal exports would go from 165 million tonnes last year to over 1000 million tonnes in less than 10 years.
“That’s a six-fold increase in around half the time it has taken Queensland’s coal exports to move from 71 to 165 million tonnes.
“Greenpeace’s continuing comic book antics in Queensland confirm that they are not interested in being part of any solution, but entirely focused on tearing down what they refuse to understand, regardless of the consequences,” Mr Roche said.