We'll be an energy superpower: PM

JOHN HOWARD wants Australia to become an "energy superpower", carving out a position as one of the world's biggest exporters of coal, natural gas, uranium and petroleum.
The Prime Minister's vision would see Australia dramatically increase its share of the world's market, taking advantage of growing international insecurity about energy and soaring prices.
He said Australia's energy exports were forecast to grow to around $45 billion in 2006-07, more than three times what was earned last year from meat, grains and wool combined.
"As an efficient, reliable supplier, Australia has a massive opportunity to increase its share of global energy trade," he told a Committee for Economic Development of Australia lunch in Sydney.
In a long speech that also called for greater national water reform and more water recycling, Mr Howard gave a nod to fossil fuels' contribution to rising global temperatures and changing weather. But he continued to reject both the Kyoto Protocol and carbon emissions trading or a carbon price as a way of dealing with climate change, preferring instead to rely on as yet commercially unproven carbon capture and storage technology.
"The Government's energy policy framework unapologetically emphasises the role of new low-emission technologies to deliver a sustainable greenhouse outcome and it unapologetically seeks to preserve the economic value of our energy resources at a time of soaring global demand," he said.
Opposition and green groups said Mr Howard's promises were illusory because his vision took no account of the rising economic and environmental damage posed by climate change.
"There is a limited 'golden age' to send Australian minerals out the door," said a Greenpeace energy campaigner, Catherine Fitzpatrick.
"If we continue along this path [of heavy reliance on fossil fuels] we will have a cataclysmic climate outcome," she said, adding that so-called low-emission technologies would use a large amount of energy to "clean" the dirty energy generated by coal.
The Labor spokesman on the environment, Anthony Albanese, said greenhouse gas emissions would not fall without market-based mechanisms that would put a price on carbon.
"If the Prime Minister was serious [about climate change] he would follow the lead of the Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change, which showed the longer we delay action the greater the cost to the economy," he said. "There is no recognition [in the speech] that we live in a carbon-constrained world … it's just business as usual."

Mr Howard said renewable energy sources would play a limited role in Australia's energy mix because they were more expensive than fossil fuels. But he failed to point out that clean coal technologies were expected to sharply boost the price of electricity while nuclear power remained one of the world's most heavily government-subsidised forms of power.
He also reiterated the role he believed nuclear energy could make to cutting greenhouse gases, citing the construction of new nuclear reactors in Asia. In Europe, Spain, Sweden, Germany, Italy and Belgium have committed to phasing out nuclear power in favour of renewable energy.
On water, Mr Howard said a sense of urgency was needed on pricing, trading of entitlements and better management for the environment. He called on premiers to consider projects with an emphasis on recycling effluent and harvesting storm water rather than desalination.
FUEL BUSTERS
STATE Transit will stockpile rather than sell its old buses in case rising petrol prices drive commuters to public transport. Fuel prices are expected to hit $1.50 a litre in the city next week. Crude oil prices hit an all-time high of $US78.40 a barrel last week amid fears that conflict in the Middle East would disrupt fuel supplies.