The Senate Inquiry of 2015 into Fuel Security
by David Archibald
5 April 2026
Australia is in the invidious position of having a Prime Minister and a Leader of the Opposition who, when they were Transport Minister and Energy Minister respectively, did their best to scuttle fuel security for Australia. They can’t be taken seriously on the subject.
Who can lead us out of this vale of tears1? It won’t be One Nation. Pauline Hanson has said that One Nation doesn’t do policy; they prefer to just pass judgement on the efforts of others. Developing policy requires work and you might be criticised. And it won’t be the Labor Party or Liberal Party; global warming hysteria and keeping the lights on are mutually exclusive.
In the last 50 years there has been only one Federal politician who was serious about fuel security. He was a Democratic Labor Party senator for Victoria, who did a deal and got the numbers to start a Senate inquiry into fuel security. There were 41 submissions accepted2 by the inquiry. You can read them at this link. Let’s see if there is anything in them that can be recycled to get us up to speed on what needs to be done now.
The submission from Engineers Australia tells us that there will be no positive contribution from the professional societies. Their submission concluded by saying that Australia should be:
Accelerating activities to substitute low-carbon fuels for fossil liquid fuels.
That sentence tells us that Engineers Australia lives in a world of magic, in which you can wish things to come true. They couldn’t name their substitute low-carbon fuels or provide heat and mass calculations on how to make them, or where the energy for that is going to come from.
What is worth recycling are some graphics from submission No 33, which was my contribution to the inquiry. Start with this one on peak oil:
In his 1956 paper, King Hubbert used a logistic decline plot to predict that peak US conventional oil production would be in 1973. That duly happened. In the above graph, the same methodology derives that peak conventional oil for the planet was in 2005. We haven’t felt it yet because growth was seamlessly fuelled by the tight oil boom of the US. Now that that has topped out, we will get a double whammy from the decline in US tight oil production along with the continuing decline in world oil production. Knowing that peak oil was upon us late last century, we should have spent the last 30 years preparing to replace oil. As the head of the International Energy Agency said then:
One day we will run out of oil; it is not today or tomorrow, but one day we will run out of oil and we have to leave oil before oil leaves us, and we have to prepare ourselves for that day.
Next up is this graphic of energy density by fuel type. Ethanol can be considered to be a poison in petrol. It has only two thirds of the energy density of petrol, because of that oxygen atom in the molecule. It is hygroscopic, which means that it takes water out of the air. That water then pools at the bottom of the tank, which allows bacteria to chew on the petrol molecules. This produces acid which eats into the tank walls. It takes more energy to produce ethanol than the ethanol contributes to the blend. No self-respecting civilisation would pollute their fuel with it. Ethanol in our fuel is one of John Howard’s dark deeds. Manildra, which processes sugar, was a big financial contributor to the Liberal Party. The ethanol mandate was John Howard’s reward to them.
On the broader subject of biofuels, before tractors, 20% of a wheat farm was given to growing oats to feed the horses needed for ploughing. So once tractors came along, wheat production went up 25%. Now farmers have the option of growing their own fuel via canola. A hectare planted to canola in the WA Wheatbelt might produce 1.7 tonnes of canola which will yield 750 litres of canola oil. At 30 litres of fuel per hectare for cropping, one hectare devoted to canola will provide the fuel for another 24 hectares of seed or grain. Four percent of the farm has to be under canola for the farm to be self-sufficient. The current canola oil price is twice the diesel price. So, using canola oil to produce canola oil will be economic at a much higher price.
Petrol has 80% of the energy content of diesel and so, all things being equal, diesel should be priced 25% higher.
This graphic illustrates another part of the promise of fuel security through coal liquefaction. Apart from the autarky, self-reliance, big boy pants etc. of self-sufficiency, there will be a major turnaround in our terms of trade. At a consumption rate of one million barrels per day and the current price of US$112 per barrel, we are spending $60 billion per annum on imported fuel. We don’t have to stop there. Australian coal exports are 500 million tonnes per annum. If that was converted to synthetic fuels at three barrels per tonne, that would be 4.1 million barrels per day.
In reality, we would continue exporting good coal and convert our super-abundance of low-grade coal. A methanol plant in China was designed to handle coal with a 55% ash content. In fact, rocks will burn in pure oxygen down to a carbon content of 10%, which opens up a lot of potential. For example, the Nifty copper deposit in Western Australia is hosted by a Proterozoic shale with a grey colour due to its carbon content. Vast swathes of the West Australian desert would have similar rocks at surface. There is the potential for it all to be dug up, put through a gasifier with pure oxygen and converted to fine dust, which in the fullness of time will be blown away by the howling winds of the next glacial maximum.
David Archibald is the author of The Anticancer Garden in Australia
- The current status of petrol stations this weekend:
- Last year the Labor Government in Western Australia had a parliamentary inquiry into ‘assisting our major trading partners to decarbonise’. This would have been laying the groundwork for the state government to lift its ban on uranium mining. I made three submissions to the inquiry, none of which were accepted. This is likely due to the fact that I pointed out that none of our major trading partners are decarbonising. Our largest trading partner, China, is going hammer and tongs at putting more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. China has at least a dozen coal liquefaction plants operating now, and is in the process of building more out in Xinjiang Province.
On the subject of self-delusion in support of the narrative, the following photograph was taken at a mine site in Western Australia, likely one of the Fortescue iron ore mines:
It is an electric bus being recharged by a diesel generator. This setup would use at least 30% more diesel than a diesel bus by itself. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair: You can’t reason a man out of his self-delusion when his grift depends upon him not understanding reality.
Carbon/climate delusion is like petty crime or abandoning shopping trolleys on the street. Society is worse off by indulging those who partake in it.