Coal news and updates

Some Australia bureaucrats kept out of Adani’s coal-port deal: report

Officials from key departments in Australia’s Queensland state were kept out of important decisions about the Adani Group’s ambitious coal-rail-port project, a news report on the ABC News website said on Wednesday.
“The Queensland treasury and the department of premier and cabinet were frozen out of key government decisions about the controversial $16 billion Adani Mining project,” the report said.
“Documents obtained by ABC revealed senior treasury bureaucrats were even “uninvited” from a high level meeting involving the company and the department of state development,” the report added.
A spokesperson for Adani Group in India said the company wouldn’t like to comment on the ABC report.
The Carmichael project in the untapped Galilee Basin, designed to produce 60 million tonnes a year of thermal coal used in power stations, has been opposed by environmental activist groups, which objected to new coal mines as well as the rail lines and ports needed to ship the coal.
Adani Group purchased the greenfield Carmichael coal mine and the Port of Abbot Point, which are proposed to be linked by rail, in 2010, seeking to build a vertically integrated business for mining and export of coal to offshore markets including India.
The ABC report added that documents, obtained under the right to information laws, “reveal confusion and suspicion among high ranking Queensland bureaucrats about the decision-making process.”
It quoted the head of treasury as saying, “I would prefer to keep at arm’s length at present, and not get trapped into a set-up.”
According to a separate news report in the Sydney Morning Herald, Queensland’s Labor government said it will continue to support the Adani project, despite revelations that the government’s own Treasury officials believe the project is unbankable.

source: http://www.livemint.com