You may have heard the quote - ‘every fine and wonderful thing stands on a knife’s edge of destruction and moment by moment must be fought for’. This has been true, right from day one with Mount Isa Mines.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
It’s a subject that I’ve never raised before but we the people of North West Queensland must fight for our future.
Our future depends on competitively priced electricity and I give a blunt warning that if we do not get the co-operation of government on this issue then the Queensland and Australian economies may place in jeopardy over $3000 million dollars a year in export earnings from fertiliser and copper, silver, lead, zinc.
I don’t believe that ore bodies are finite and in my younger days when I was copper gauging with Les Prosser, we were working the Flora Dora amongst other mines and we delineated what was a massive copper resource but far too low grade to work even today ‘but tomorrow’ -it will not be too low grade.
There are many of those ore bodies.
We cannot forgive the appalling mistake by the Queensland government and the then management of Mount Isa Mines in rejecting the CopperString proposal.
CopperString was a power line to be built from Mount Isa (Cloncurry) to Townsville putting North West Queensland onto the national energy market.
The federal government (both ALP and Liberal) agreed to a $320 million grant to build CopperString, both of them realised the necessity for competitively priced power in the biggest export earning city in Australia.
We now have Copper String back on the table and with it comes 1000 megawatts (that’s enough power to meet all of the base load electricity requirements of North Queensland ) the Big Kennedy wind farm (north of Hughenden). Proponents have said that it’s their belief, that they will be able to raise the money for their project if the government provides this same assistance and support Copper String is built.
So the battle is on, I have been advised that meetings have been held in Canberra.
In my discussions with the new Prime Minister last week, we raised the issue and said with Big Kennedy at Hughenden, Hell’s Gates at Townsville, Charters Towers (Tully Hydro Realignment plus the proposal on the Mitchell River, we will be able to produce 10 per cent of Australia’s electricity and 15 per cent of our petrol, clean and forever.
