Archive for the ‘Adelaide’ Category
electrification, copper, water and South Australia
we shall see..
So, according to the South Australian government, ‘SA contains 69% of Australia’s… demonstrated resources of copper’, which is an essential element for the future of electrification worldwide, so we’re sitting on a copper goldmine, or a golden coppermine, and what is it with gold anyway?
A provocative article by Michael McGuire was published in the Adelaide Advertiser’s Weekend magazine, for June 17-18, highlighting prospective developments regarding mining copper in Kapunda and environs, a region that, in the 19th century, made South Australia ‘the biggest producer of copper in the British Empire’, until the copper market crashed in 1870s, and the mines were abandoned. The article also highlighted BHP’s interest in this suddenly in-demand element, and the problematic past relationship between the mining giant (in little Australia’s terms) and the SA government.
I recall some months ago conversing with a friend at a culinary gathering, and the subject turned to renewable energy and EVs. He was negative about their global uptake, and when I pressed him on why, he only had one word to say – copper. I was a bit miffed about his pouring cold water on my optimism, but it led me to writing a piece on copper here back in October 2022. The last words of that piece make for a good lead-in:
Australia, by the way, has the second largest copper reserves in the world (a long way behind Chile), and this could presumably be turned to our benefit. I’m sure a lot of magnates are magnetised by the thought.
So. As we know, EVs require about four times as much copper as ICE vehicles. Wind farms, solar panels and charging stations are also heavily reliant on copper. According to McGuire’s article:
Electric car sales increased by 60% last year to pass 10 million globally for the first time, making up about 14% of the market. Some are predicting as many as 60% of all new car sales will be electric by 2030 and close to 100% by 2050…
And some are not. But there’s no doubt that EVs are on the up and up, with Australia being shamefully behindhand, largely due to our lack of manufacturing here, and our distance from other EV manufacturers, not to mention government ‘hesitancy’.
Making copper more available here will clearly make a difference to all that. But one problem that needs to be solved is water. Mining and smelting copper requires lots of it. BHP has been tapping into the Great Artesian Basin, but this isn’t environmentally sustainable, so the company has been discussing a new initiative with the state government. The proposed Northern Water Supply Project includes the building of a desalination plant in Whyalla, and a pipeline to pump water to Olympic Dam and other sites in the state’s far north, a hugely expensive project (the required environmental impact statement alone is costed at $230 million) which the SA government is likely to provide funding for only if BHP, with which it has had a more than troubled relationship, chips in a substantial amount.
BHP’s Olympic Dam, over 500 kms north of Adelaide, is a resource centre for copper, gold and uranium, which, of course, is now being touted as a sustainable decarbonisation hub. And there are other projects and opportunities, involving state and private enterprise. As well as the water facility in Whyalla, there are plans for a $600 million hydrogen plant, and for upgrading Whyalla’s steel plant, and exploiting the region’s undeveloped iron ore resources. SA is already leading the country in its abundance of solar and wind power, so, according to McGuire,
.. the theory is, South Australia becomes a centre for green copper and green steel production at the very time the world is crying out for such products. As an aside, the cheaper energy available from hydrogen, sun and wind also attracts a whole heap of other businesses to South Australia.
Again, all of this, especially the hydrogen, will require a large volume of available water, meaning that various projects will have to come together to make the projected boom happen. One person who seems bullish about it all is BHP’s chief operating officer, who points out that though the state has 70% of Australia’s copper resources, it’s currently producing less than 30% of the country’s mined copper. Basto was previously in charge of BHP’s Escondida mine in Chile, the largest copper mine on the planet, and has headed the company’s iron ore operation in Western Australia. Currently he is working on developments from BHP’s $9.6 billion acquisition of Oz Minerals, which has successfully operated copper mines in the far north – at Carrapateena and Prominent Hill. These mines, along with Olympic Dam, and Oak Dam (a new and apparently very promising development), ‘all lie within a geological zone known as the Gawler Craton’, which Basto predicts, or hopes, will become a lucrative mining hub in the not too distant future. Australia, as he and others point out, is a ‘stable jurisdiction’ for mining, compared to other resource-rich regions in South America and Africa.
This is a real issue. Historically, locals have been worked more or less to death, in Columbian silver mines for example, as described in Gaia Vince’s Adventures in the Anthropocene. And it’s still happening. Wikipedia provides a horrific list of mining disasters over just the last 20 years in the largely impoverished Democratic Republic of the Congo, mostly from artisanal or small-scale ‘independent’ mining. Which brings us back to Kapunda, and restoring its copper reputation, with a difference. A wife and husband team, Philippa and Leon Faulkner have formed a company, EnviroCopper, based in Kapunda, which will, eventually, re-open the mine using a process called ‘in situ recovery’. To quote from McGuire’s article:
… this will not be a regular mine. No big holes. No big explosions. Just some white pipes poking out of the ground. Which, with the town of Kapunda right there, is a definite advantage.
The process, used for uranium mining further north, involves pumping an acidic solution ‘through the porous rocks, which dissolves the copper, and then the liquid is pumped back up to the surface through bores or wells, and the metal is recovered’. It is much more enviro-friendly and low impact than the old 19th century form of mine, though it may still be a pipe dream at present. The next year or so will be key to whether government, big mining and various smaller enterprising players can get it all together to take the state further down the road of green energy production and utilisation. It will be most interesting…
References
‘The next Big Thing’, by Michael McGuire, The Advertiser SA Weekend, June 17-18 2023
https://www.mining-technology.com/marketdata/ten-largest-coppers-mines/
Gaia Vince, Adventures in the Anthropocene, 2014
an interminable conversation 7: East Turkestan and the question of genocide
the uneasy life…
Canto: So several years ago I was invited, sort of, to take over an English class for NESB students at Wandana Community Community Centre in Gilles Plains, a north-eastern suburb of Adelaide, here in sleepy South Australia. Some of the students had been coming to my class in the city, because they were unhappy with their then teacher at Wandana. My city class had people of all ages, from 16 to 60, Indians, Africans and Europeans. The Wandana group was always women, of Middle Eastern appearance, most but not all wearing hijabs. So I accepted this offer, and found myself in the pleasant company of a lively group of women, many of them young mothers taking advantage of the community centre’s creche facilities. During introductions I asked about their native countries. There were a couple of Iraqis (Kurds in fact), one Afghani, and a large number of women from East Turkestan, a country I’d never heard of. I’d heard a bit about the ‘Stans’, but other than Pakistan and Afghanistan I wasn’t sure of any other names or locations…
Jacinta: East Turkestan is their name for Xinjiang Province in north-west China.
Canto: You’re spoiling my story. I just accepted that there was a country called East Turkestan, and that these women were Muslim, and seemed to know each other well, and liked to ask political questions and engage in argument, and seemed to amusingly dominate their husbands who came to pick them up after class. I became friendly with the centre’s social worker, also from East Turkestan. She it was who ‘recruited’ me to Wandana. She spoke perfect English, and filled me in on the East Turkestan story. The region was, as you know, called Xinjiang Province by the Chinese, and had been part of China for some time, but its inhabitants were clearly not Han Chinese, and saw themselves as completely separate as a people, if not as a nation. So I was intrigued, but just accepted it as one of the anomalies of cultures and nations…
Jacinta: Like the non-existent but presumably real Kurdistan?
Canto: Precisely…
Jacinta: Life is weirdly unfair like that, when you have cultures or language groups that would make sense as properly official nations, with their recognised boundaries, their vote at the UN, their good or bad governments, and then you’ve got made-up nations, created by exterior forces, like Afghanistan, and dozens of African nations decided at the Berlin Conference of 1884-5 or the Balkan and other states at the Other Berlin Conference of 1878, or was it the other way around?
Canto: Yes, nations are often such arbitrary creations and then their inhabitants get all nationalistic and xenophobic and irrational about ‘their’ piece of land. Anyway, my thoughts on East Turkestan took a different turn when the social worker asked me to help write a letter to the Federal Immigration Minister regarding her brother, an Australian citizen who had returned to his native region for a holiday and had ended up in prison in Kazakhstan, across the border from Xinjiang. I was assured that he had done nothing wrong, but I couldn’t get any more details apart from the claim that Uyghurs (she didn’t use this term, which I didn’t know about until after I’d left Wandana) were being arbitrarily imprisoned in the province, and if they fled to Kazakhstan they were also in danger, due to dodgy dealings between that country and China. Anyway, I left for more lucrative pastures shortly afterwards, but I very much doubt that our letter had the required result.
Jacinta: That Adelaide suburb, Gilles Plains, apparently houses the largest Uyghur community in Australia.
Canto: Yes, and since I left Wandana, more than a decade ago, the oppression of the Uyghur people has worsened – or maybe I just know more about it. It seems their region was kind of in the way of the Belt and Road project, and/or some of the population there were getting uppity about autonomy, and certainly not conforming to a one-China ideology, so the Party started getting aggressive, which bred more Uyghur violence, which led to mass disappearances and ‘re-education camps’ and some talk about using them as fields for harvesting organs.
Jacinta: Yes, these claims have been aired for years, and of course strenuously denied by the Party, though a paper was quite recently published in the American Journal of Transplantation(!), entitled ‘Execution by organ procurement: Breaching the dead donor rule in China’, which purports to find evidence of such things, though as far as I can see, no evidence is provided as to specific ‘donors’.
Canto: So all of this Uyghur stuff has been brought back to mind by my reading of the book China Panic, by David Brophy, a historian of Uyghur nationalism and a senior lecturer in modern Chinese history at Sydney University. Chapter 6 of the book is called ‘Human rights and Xinjiang’, and it provides much interesting and sobering background info. It seems that the Uyghurs, and Muslims in general (not all Uyghurs are Muslim), have become the Party’s new villains, replacing the Falon Gong of recent years. Promoting their faith to their fellows can elicit a hefty prison sentence. As with the Party’s treatment of Tibetans, but more so, Uyghurs’ visible and behavioural differences from bog-standard Han-ness are seen as a security threat. They’re also stigmatised as ‘backward’, hence the re-education gimmick, which taps into the standard racism that will be familiar to Australians who know our history of stealing indigenous children and providing them with a proper Christian education. With the USA still under the influence of the post-September 11 ‘war on terror’ it was hard to garner too much sympathy for the Uyghurs from that country and its allies, including Australia, but the lack of response, and worse, from Muslim countries has been disappointing, to say the least. Here’s how Brophy puts it:
In fact, at the most recent meeting of foreign ministers of the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation, they went so far as to ‘commend the efforts of the People’s Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens’ – an appalling stance.
It seems that some of these countries had their own problems with minorities, and felt that crack-downs in the name of ‘national solidarity’ were justified – and of course there’s the question of valuable financial ties with China. And there was also just plain ignorance about Uyghur identity, at least early on.
Jacinta: Well, think of the Palestinians – it seems nobody is on their side, certainly on a national level, outside the Middle East.
Canto: Well, I’ve read at least two books by Palestinians about their history and their plight. And there are pro-Palestinian movements and groups, here in Australia and elsewhere, but the Uyghurs don’t have that profile…
Jacinta: I bet they have some articulate spokespeople and writers…
Canto: They’d have to be outside China. But that’s worth exploring. Anyway, Wikipedia has an article, Uyghur genocide, which says it straight, and makes for sickening reading.
Jacinta: So what is to be done?
Canto: The big question. China under The Party is, unsurprisingly, more than reluctant to sign up to any human rights conventions. As Wikipedia puts it:
In December 2020, a case brought to the International Criminal Court was dismissed because the crimes alleged appeared to have been “committed solely by nationals of China within the territory of China, a State which is not a party to the [Rome Statute of the ICC]”, meaning the ICC couldn’t investigate them.
The lack of public awareness and sympathy for these people, who could be described as just as in thrall to their religion as many United Staters are to theirs, might also be due to the lingering ‘war on terror’, and the consequent anti-Muslim prejudices evident here in Australia as elsewhere. All we can do here is highlight the plight of these people, and counteract propaganda against them, which is going on here, courtesy of Chinese pamphleteers, young people who I suspect know nothing about the real situation.
Jacinta: That’s an important point. A recent study found that the Chinese have far more faith in their government than, for example, Russians have faith in theirs. I presume that’s because Russians are more connected to the WEIRD world than the Chinese, most of whom have never at any time sniffed the chance of getting out from under paternalistic fascism. Their media has been far more controlled for far longer. Though still, there is hope from expat Chinese, and even temporary residents, students who express love for being in a ‘freedom country’, if only for a few years.
Canto: Well, you may have gotten this idea about China’s faith in their government and its media from the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, episode 893, in which, in its science or fiction section, Steve Novella trumped most of the Rogues with the item – ‘Reported trust in the media in 2021 was highest in China at 80%, and lowest in Russia at 29%, with the US in between at 39%’, which turned out to be ‘science’. As Novella pointed out, this was reported trust. It may well be that the Chinese population, after what they’d been through with Mao and the Tiananmen crack-down, and now with their latest thug, wouldn’t dare to stand up against the ubiquity of state media.
Jacinta: So it’s up to outsiders to speak up, and to encourage Uyghur expats to speak up, to allow them a voice and provide a listening ear and a sense of due outrage at the horrors being inflicted upon them.
References
David Brophy, China panic: Australia’s alternative to paranoia and pandering, 2021