Oil
By international standards Queensland has no significant oil reserves. The first commercial production of oil in Australia began at Moonie in 1962. Further oil deposits were discovered in South West Queensland in the 1980s. Australia's largest onshore oil field is located at Jackson. An oil pipeline runs from Jackson to Brisbane. In 2003, the pipeline burst open at Lytton causing Queensland's largest-ever oil spill. Queensland has most of Australia's 30 billion barrels of known oil shale resources. In 2008, a 20 year moratorium on shale oil mining was enacted because of environmental concerns. The ban was lifted in early 2013, allowing commercial production to begin at a Queensland Energy Resources plant at Gladstone.
Caltex Australia owns the largest fuels refinery in Queensland, Lytton Refinery, which is located at Lytton. It began operations in 1965 and produces a range of petroleum products which meets more than half of the state's fuel needs. A second fuel refinery is located nearby at Bulwer Island and is owned by BP.
The Queensland Oil Vulnerability Taskforce was established by Peter Beattie in May 2005. The taskforce was led by the Member for Hervey Bay, Andrew McNamara, aiming to investigate supply constraints, rising prices and the impact of peak oil on Queenslanders. The taskforce produced the McNamara Report which concluded that the state was highly vulnerable to rising oil prices and that alternative energy sources could not be easily substituted. The key recommendation was for the Queensland Government to develop a mitigation strategy and action plan.
Read more about this topic: Energy In Queensland
Famous quotes containing the word oil:
“I became increasingly anarchistic. I began to find people of my own class vicious, people in clean collars uninteresting. I even accepted smells, personal as well as official. Everyone who came to the studio smelled either of machine oil or herring.”
—Margaret Anderson (1886–1973)
“I bade, because the wick and oil are spent
And frozen are the channels of the blood....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“As artists they’re rot, but as providers they’re oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter. And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.”
—Dorothy Parker (1893–1967)