Fire at Geelong refinery - was it deliberate sabotage?

One of Australia's only two remaining onshore oil refineries - Geelong in VIC - had a big fire.

There's a lot of conjecture about whether the incident is the result of deliberate sabotage or something else.

Chris Bowen the federal energy minister has said it will affect domestic fuel production.

The net zero zealots are trying every con trick in the book to push uptake of electric vehicles.

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swirlie · 31-35, F

Even with EV, your country still requires a means to power the grid.

zonavar68 · 56-60, M

@swirlie If electric trucks (more than 10x as power hungry as electric cars) take off, our grid requires to be amplified 10x which means 10x as much grid capacity to deliver electricity to end-users *plus* 10x as much energy transformation from other sources into electricity.

That kind of scale-up is almost impossible to make happen.

swirlie · 31-35, F

@zonavar68
Scaling up is the easy part. The hard part is finding a source of energy to run the turbines which generate electricity, unless of course you have a nuclear powered grid like Canada does.

Is your grid powered by diesel generators or is it nuclear powered?

zonavar68 · 56-60, M

@swirlie We have no nuclear power stations here in Australia. Lots of gas peaking plants. There's basically zero dependable backup.

Speaking of nuclear power stations, they are supposed to be able to 'run' disconnected from the grid. It's called 'islanding'.

I guess the same applies to coal fired and gas fired ones.

The electricity grid can't run on unicorn farts and sunbeams alone being stored in big phat batteries (ie. 'phatteries')..

swirlie · 31-35, F

@zonavar68
Okay, so if you have natural gas wells in Australia, then there shouldn't be any problem with powering the electrical grid. But if Liquified Natural Gas is brought into Australia by the ocean tanker load and that LNG comes from the Persian Gulf, then we have a problem.

If the LNG comes by tanker from China to Australia, no different than refined oil products get to Australia from China, then most likely the LNG would be coming indirectly from Canada since Canada is now supplying China with LNG by the boatload ever since Trump invaded Iran.