experts debunk Morrison government claim of 53,000 fewer jobs from coal and gas ban
- Written by Alison Reeve, Deputy Program Director, Energy and Climate Change, Grattan Institute
In an analysis recently released to News Limited newspapers[1], the Morrison government claims[2] banning new coal and gas projects in Queensland would risk 53,000 jobs and A$85 billion in investment.
But we checked the job claims and found them highly exaggerated.
The government analysis, released by federal Resources Minister Keith Pitt, came in response to a call[3] by the Greens for a six-month moratorium on new coal, oil and gas projects.
We analysed the most recent government data[4]. We found even in an extreme scenario where all new coal and gas projects are banned, reductions in future Queensland jobs would be at most one-tenth of what the minister claims.
A ban won’t affect every project
The most recent government dataset lists 44 coal projects and nine gas projects in Queensland. Two of the gas projects have already started production, so we discounted these from our analysis.
The rest of the dataset comprises the following projects:
six “committed” projects: those with environmental and planning approvals and a final investment decision
29 “feasible” projects: undergoing detailed analysis on their commercial viability, and awaiting environmental and planning approvals
16 “announced” projects with no detailed work behind them yet.
Some 18 projects in the dataset don’t report job numbers, and our analysis doesn’t assume any jobs from these projects. Three of these are committed or complete (so there are more jobs locked in than our estimate of 4,786 suggests). Fifteen are uncommitted, meaning our estimate of the jobs impacted by a ban might be slightly low.
We also examined historic data for the small number of committed projects where job number estimates were provided. None created more jobs than their initial estimate, and some provided fewer.
In one case, Adani’s Carmichael mine, there were 975 fewer construction jobs and 2,270 fewer operational jobs in the 2021 data than estimated in 2017.
So, all this suggests even the more realistic job numbers we calculated aren’t guaranteed to come to fruition.
Read more:
Japan wants to burn ammonia for clean energy – but it may be a pyrrhic victory for the climate[7]
