Taking Australia’s resources industry from boom to brilliant

 

In this video, filmed in partnership with the Australian Financial Review for Australia’s Energy Future, Mary Hackett, GE Oil and Gas regional director, Australia and New Zealand, explains why Australia should remain optimistic about its future as a resources superpower.

Mary Hackett sees Australia as perfectly positioned to remain a key player in the energy future, reasoning that the nation is “emerging as a superpower in terms of resource production, particularly in terms of delivery of LNG. In five years, Australia will be the number-one LNG producer.” GE is helping companies to lead the way, with CSG-to-LNG processing ‘trains’; QGC, for example, exported its first shipment of compressed LNG from Curtis Island in December 2014. Australia Pacific LNG and Santos Gladstone LNG have also installed similar GE trains on Curtis Island, off the the coast of Queensland. Hackett explains that gas is emerging “as a critical transitional fuel into the future … for Australia that is really important in terms of energy security”.

“We’ve seen an historic boom in Australia, and I doubt we would ever see a boom of this nature again,” continues Hackett. “In LNG, we’ve gone from seven trains to 21 trains ultimately, in the next five years, so that’s enormous on a world scale … what you see from there is investment that follows on that strong foundation. I don’t think there is any need to be pessimistic about the future because now we have a very solid base of production.”

In communities around which resources development is beginning or continuing, companies must work to explain new production technologies and also the social and economic benefits, adds Hackett. “There’s a lot of urban myth associated with gas reserves, as with any new industry,” she says. “Education is critical, engaging our communities, having them understand and ultimately rally to have this development happen for better social outcomes and also for better overall economic results.”

Hackett stresses that the latest technologies for resources development and production are no longer ‘nice to have’, they are essential. It’s also vital for industry to capitalise on the manifold benefits of linking machines via the Industrial Internet. “It’s critical that we have the analytics ... as we run complex plants,” says Hackett. “We’ve got to learn to produce much, much, more efficiently than we’ve done previously.”

The Australian resources industry is well placed in that respect, too, argues Hackett, who’s spoken previously with GEreports about her own career path as an engineer. “Australia has that advantage of the highly skilled workforce,” she says, “a highly educated workforce, that can really build excellence around the operation of plants that extract resources.”