Before we start another oil rush, can we take a breath and have a look at a few facts?

Human nature is a bugger. We always tend to look for what we know and Ministers always want to be the one remembered for being the person who discovered the next big thing.

That’s no doubt why our Resources Minister Dale Last came out with the revelation that 3 km under the ground of southern Queensland, in the Taroom Trough, was a huge lake of oil that could provide a level of energy self-sufficiency. It was apparently the size of Singapore, which is an interesting diversion from the well-known volume measure of x number of Sydney Harbours.

I laughed when I first saw it. It sounded very much like the gas pipeline from PNG or maybe Clive’s Titanic 2, but is probably more appropriate in the basket of coal projects once touted for the Galilee Basin.

Nationals leader Matt Canavan thought he could take it one step further and promoted the idea of developing coal-to-liquids as something Queensland could do. Well, yeah, we could, but there is a reason we haven’t. More than one. It’s expensive, it’s about as dirty as you can get and we would have to find someone who can see a return of investment on it over 30 years when the rest of the world is walking away from coal. Banks are also a little battle-scarred over financing such projects and for evidence you only need to look at Adani’s funding problems. So, no Matt, that won’t fly, but thanks for the suggestion. We’ll just file it under stupid ideas.

Queensland has a habit of promoting these projects (hydrogen) that will save us from something and then we figure out it’s all a bit expensive, or impossible or just plain silly. I was a business journalist for many years and I saw a large number of these hoisted up several flag poles to see who saluted. The media sometimes does, aided by the fact that almost all the sceptics were made redundant years ago.

Good old Minister Dale even suggested we build a refinery to deal with the oil. He didn’t specify who the ‘we’ was. Whatever, getting this oil to the market is going to be a problem. After taxpayers footed another $2 billion to a multinational in the past week (Rio Tinto), we don’t need more nationalised projects.

As several people have pointed out on my Facebook page, there are a large number of drawbacks to Dale’s fever dream. Money, being one. We are talking billions of dollars here. Secondly, the Americans may have mastered drilling 3 km underground and fracking the hell out of it, but they didn’t have the silly little impediment like the Great Artesian Basin in the way.

Also, given the nature of such projects, this will take years to get off the ground. Significantly, we could hold off and sever our oil dependency by electrifying the transport network. Maybe subsidising EVs would be a better spend or maybe shifting Jarrod out of the Planning portfolio so a few more green energy projects could get up.

(Picture: Zbynek Burival, Unsplash)

Afterall, it was our dependency on oil that got us into this.

One thing that gives the project credibility is the involvement of Tri-Star, a Texan company that has a long history in Queensland and was one of the first to get involved in coal seam gas development. It picked a winner, there. Tri-Star doesn’t do silly projects.

Also, there is a tiny refinery in Eromanga, so it’s not impossible. Just don’t throw your superannuation on it for now.

Old mate Dale was a bit presumptuous in touting this project. It is in the early exploration stages and not every exploration ends up in development. It all looks a little like the State Government was trying its hardest to appear as if it was doing something.