Australia's 100 Year Energy Plan - an Introduction to ANIEIP

Mothusi Pahl shared his views published in the Financial Times, Friday 5 April 2024,  on taxpayer funded hydrogen projects in their varying forms and the question of delivering hydrogen by road transportation, versus pipeline transportation in the USA.

Hydrogen has always been produced in small volumes to meet small demand; and transported mostly by road tankers. Expectations for increased volumes of green hydrogen production by the energy intensive electrolyser method, are restricted by green energy produced from "renewables" operating unreliably and intermittently; and their dependance on availability of baseload energy generated by nuclear, coal or gas.

If hydrogen is to be produced in bulk volumes for domestic or export consumption, the question of transportation again becomes relevant as all forms of ocean/land transportation currently, are heavily dependent on fossil fueled energy forms that, at this time, do not facilitate decarbonisation.

Until nuclear energy can be utilised to energise transportation, hydrogen distributed through fixed infrastructure, is the only 'transportable' clean energy source capable of replacing hydrocarbon sources.

Energy transportation figures across all economy modes. That then, is the driver for Australia's ANIEIP 100 Year Energy Plan.

Pahl's commentary points out the folly of transportation of hydrogen by road transport tankers thence returning empty over long distances, to refill.  For the most part, current means of road and rail transporters are diesel powered incurring a heavy CO2 footprint.

Australia's ANIEIP 100 Year Energy Plan allows for almost green hydrogen production by coal refinement using the gasification methods; and beneficiation methods to produce a range of premium carbon products and rare earth minerals within the  ANIEIP Industrial Corridor, proposed by us to pass through the Galilee and/or Bowen coalfields of Northern Australia to the export Ports of Townsville in the east, Port Hedland in the West; connecting near Tennant Creek, with the existing infrastructure that links Darwin in the North and Adelaide/Port Pirie in the South. 

The ANIEIP Agro-Industrial Corridor eminently doable and can be built now, by employing high efficiency coal and gas fired energy. 

The infrastructure to be built, transitions Australia from predominantly coal and gas energy generation, through to hydrogen and onwards to nuclear energy generation, planned from the outset and 100% privately funded from within Australia and internationally, by our closest defence allies.

New ANIEIP infrastructure will include pipelines for fresh water, for  storage of pressurized hydrogen delivery to the Ports, road/train vehicular refilling stations, natural gas and specialty gas pipelines connecting the coal and Beetaloo Basin gas fields, transnational energy grid networks to the industrial centres spread east, west and north, including energy delivery to the electric-arc furnace steel mills and the metals refineries within the Corridor, passing through, or within reachable proximity of the resource locations.

Energy intensive fertiliser plants, concrete plants, consuming voracious volumes of carbonaceous product blended with limestone will be needed, to build the trans-national ANIEIP Highways and Railways; and the water conservation and soil remediation schemes to both water the new inland agro-industries, their communities and the important interconnected, national defence infrastructure that will shield the nation in the northern regions.

Coal and gas will energise ANIEIP from the start, transitioning to hydrogen for both energy and heavy transportation forms; and thence, to nuclear energy, to radically reduce reliance on coal and gas, to power the entire north.  Heavy road and rail transportation and mining equipment will be supplied by current diesel manufacturers who have already transitioned to hydrogen, from gas turbines and ICE ships and vehicles, to supply ANIEIP. Gasoline, avgas and oil lubricants, will originate from central Australia's hydrocarbon resources, refined within ANIEIP, to eliminate dependence on imports, for both domestic consumption and export.

Phase I of the ANIEIP 100 Year Energy Plan for Australia is the key to Australia’s defence. It is focused in the north.

Phase I is doable because of its scale. That scale can only be achieved in Northern Australia in the shortest possible time. Nowhere else, can such a scale succeed, because of ANIEIP’s under exploited, abundantly rich and rare mineralised zones, that exist among the hydrocarbon and nuclear resource zones; in  the tropical, yet parched north, where the monsoons arrive with regularity yet, where water conservation literally does not yet exist.

Phase I sets up Australia’s ability to compete, internationally.

Phase II of the ANIEIP 100 Year Energy Plan, will focus on implementing a similar scale of energy transition across that part of the nation, south of the Tropic of Capricorn.  The majority of Australia’s existing agro-industrial infrastructure benefits the southern, most populous regions and the ANIEIP I scale of planning, can be employed by expansion, where doable, into the southern regions.

This, in part, is the ANIEIP National 100 Year Energy Plan for Australia.  The secret of its success is the unpublished part of the Plan, as to how it will be done, without subsidies, incentives, rebates or price fixing, but what can be revealed, it will be done in close cooperation and the full involvement of our closest allies.