Australia's resources, future economic development. (fence, cost, storage)

[Geezerrunner]

Having mineral deposits of iron, bauxite, opals, coal, natural gas and oil as well as significant manufacturing and agriculture it is clear that Australia is well placed to be self sufficient in most ways.

But a lot of the oil is shale oil, which I believe requires the catalytic cracking extraction process which poses significant environmental hazards and is the subject of considerable public opposition in the US right now. Natural gas deposits are already well developed and gas is exported to Japan.

Australia has large reserves of uranium which can be refined into fuel for nuclear power stations so this may be a direction for future development of electrical energy. There is also a rather large warm and dry bit in the middle of the country which would presumably be a good place for solar arrays as there are few neighbours to complain.

It seems possible to me that as the economies and growing populations of various Asian countries create a growing demand for agricultural products, oil, gas, and other raw materials, that the resource sector of the economy will remain strong or grow and Australians will want to diversify the economy further and use more solar and nuclear power while exporting more gas and oil.

In many other advanced industrial economies the high technology sector, service economy and "knowledge economy" seem to be the growth areas, so it is also possible this will be true of Australia.

These possibilities are not mutually exclusive, of course, and other opportunities exist which I have not considered- what do you think most likely?

[Battleneter]

Its a vast topic.

I think Aus is well placed for exporting minerals to Asia and will benefit long term. Technology and Automation will likely keep Aus relatively competitive at the expense of jobs unfortunately.

I was on the fence with Nuclear power until Fukushima, when I realised this was the 3rd significant nuclear power accident after three mile Island and Chernobyl, two of those were effectively human error!, humans will always screw up occasionally, technology cant stop that.

Australia is very well placed for government developed Solar projects (including salt storage) with high levels of sunlight and a ton of land. Regrettably the Aus government tends to be retrenching into protecting its stranded coal based generation atm, over thinking long term. As for climate change apparently there is no real cost to that $$.

Australia has proven its not serious about the knowledge economy with pretty much the cancellation of NBN. Most people have little understanding of the technologies already here that would benefit from Fibre to the premises little own future technology. Citrix Xendeskop thin client is just "one" enterprise example. Try running VDI over a slow copper VPN with high Jitter to a slightly remote area, its not pretty but Tony Abbott and that ass clown Turnbil say its fine!!. On the up side companies can always move to NZ with true wide spread FTTP!

Australian politicians seems a tad lost atm, it all feels very 1990's with reactions to problems, I am sure they will find their feet but some of this stuff does not seems like rocket science.

[BCC_1]

Originally Posted by Geezerrunner

In many other advanced industrial economies the high technology sector, service economy and "knowledge economy" seem to be the growth areas, so it is also possible this will be true of Australia.

Australia's education industry for foreign students is huge. It's around 500k foreign students studying here at any one time.

Australia has a pretty good track record in biotech. Cochlear, CSL, Resmed, Sirtex, Acrux etc are all locally grown companies.

[Samuel,J]

Medical research too.