By TONY MOBILIFONITIS
WHEN three big oil companies shut down New Zealand’s only oil refinery, Marsden Point, in 2022 because refining margins were said to be too low to meet the costs of refining operations, Dr John Coyne, head of the Northern Australia Strategic Policy Centre, called the Kiwis “very naive”.
Most naive were Ardern’s green minions, who like fools, had already banned oil and gas exploration in 2018. After all, who needs that dirty black stuff with the “transition to renewables”, as outlined by the bird-brained International Socialist Ardern, following orders from her WEF puppet masters.
According to Marsden Point’s three oil customers, BP, Mobil and Z Energy, oil refining in Australia and New Zealand is more expensive than in Asia, so why not just import the refined products, ignoring the fact that New Zealand already taps gas and oil reserves off the Taranaki coast for local consumption.
But Coyne told Radio New Zealand they were “buying into a very dated view of globalisation, and they certainly haven’t learned the lessons from Covid-19, around secure supply chains and national resilience.” He warned that oil companies could not manage the complexities from escalating conflicts, trade splits or natural disasters.
And with the eventual closure of the Whangarei refinery and the loss of hundreds of local skilled jobs, Channel Infrastrucure took over the facility from Refining NZ with all sorts of whizbang ideas such as “green hydrogen” production – which burns four units of hydrocarbons to produce one unit of hydrogen.
And no prizes for guessing who they teamed up with to float these green dreams – climate clown Twiggy Forrest’s Fortescue Future Industries (FFI) – with whom they want to make “sustainable jet fuel” aka sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), supposedly “an alternative to conventional fossil aviation fuel produced with biological and non-biological resources”.
We presume “sustainable aviation fuel” is able to sustain an aircraft in flight, just like regular aviation fuel, but according to the woke wonderkids, feedstocks used to produce SAF replace oil, coal or gas typically used in traditional jet fuel, and can be derived from both plant and animal materials, ranging from cooking oil and plant oils to agricultural residues as well as municipal waste and waste gases.
That shitty jet fuel-mixture is guaranteed to be a load more expensive than the regular stuff, which doesn’t involve going to all the trouble of collecting all that biological crap, when crude oil and coal is basically the result of naturall biological processes anyway. But of course, anything that involves cancelling hydrocarbons from the earth must be good because it “saves the planet”.
But a growing number of shareholders in Channel Infrastructure want to stop all this baloney and restore the refining operation at the coastal facility. They figure the best way to do this is to sign up more shareholders and then vote the current management out. The deal, with three free shares on offer, is also open to Australians (see below).
The rebel shareholders are calling themselves the Collective Action for Energy Stability Group and their campaign Operation Good Oil. What these people want, essentially, is to be able to ensure a strategic supply of oil for the nation, because without it, the nation is at the mercy of so-called “global market forces”.
Channel Infrastructure CEO, Rob Buchanan, naturally thinks “decarbonisation” is a wonderful idea because Twiggy and the people at the WEF and UN say so. Buchanan and Fortescue Future Industries (FFI) have also agreed to investigate a “green hydrogen manufacturing facility at Marsden Point to produce synthetic Sustainable Aviation Fuel (eSAF) that could supply some 60 million litres of eSAF per year – equivalent to a whopping 3 per cent of the pre-Covid annual jet fuel requirements for the aviation sector in New Zealand. That shite will be expensive too.
But don’t worry, if Klaus and his Climate Clowns get their way, old fashioned hydrocarbon fuel will be outlawed and airline travel will only be for the elites with a suitable social credit score and a few million dollars worth of carbon credits.
The dizzy-headed Buchanan says his company wants “to pursue opportunities that have the potential to contribute to New Zealand’s wider decarbonisation efforts and energy transition, and bring the potential for new jobs for Northlanders.”
The equally dizzy-headed and WEF-compliant CEO of FFI, Mark Hutchinson, likes to remind us that “aviation is one of the few sectors in the world to have an industry and UN-backed goal of net-zero carbon by 2050”. Oh, brilliant Mr Hutchinson, what an original idea.
He goes on: “Airlines are relying on Sustainable Aviation Fuel as the most critical component of the industry’s roadmap. This project would position FFI as a first mover in the eSAF market, which we believe is a valuable global market for FFI. For New Zealand, domestic eSAF production would provide a greater degree of fuel security and support development of the local green hydrogen industry.”
So this woke wonderkid thinks fuel security is a great idea, but is working to destroy the refining capability of New Zealand’s last refinery simply because a bunch of bureaucrats at the UN tell him and his boardroom of boofheads that oil from the ground is naughty, naughty.
Big oil knows how to play the global green game too, while protecting their own arses. BP, for instance, is big on the “sustainability” crap because they know that any environmental regulation squeezes supply just makes it harder for their potential competition and small producers like NZ.
In 2021, BP announced it would close its Kwinana oil refinery in Perth and convert it into a fuel import terminal because it was “no longer economically viable” because of “the regional over-supply of fuel and the growth of mega-refineries in Asia and the Middle East”.
That brought the oil refineries in Australia from four to three and then a few months later ExxonMobil announced the closure of its Altona oil refinery in Melbourne, saying it also was no longer economically viable and would be turned into a fuel-import terminal.
The only two refineries are Ampol’s Brisbane refinery and Viva Energy’s refinery in Geelong, Victoria. Ampol was also reviewing whether to follow the same course. Twenty-three years ago, Australia had eight refineries that met virtually all of the country’s domestic demand for refined fuel.
But did these closures bring the price of fuel down? Not on your Nellie. Governments rake in billions in fuel tax, with Australia’s fuel excise at 49.6c a litre following the Federal Government’s latest increase to the tax on petrol and diesel products. So big oil and big government are in each other’s pockets.
For shareholders to give the boot to the woke board running Channel Infrastructure would be a big win for local control over big oil and market manipulators.
The Sharesies platform is offering a free $5, equivalent to three shares, enabling you to become a shareholder at no cost or you can go through a bank like ASB, which offers a straightforward online share trading sign-up.