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I grew up with the Shell refinery in Geelong as a permanent fixture on the horizon as the soaring pinnacle of St Mary’s Basilica on the top of Moorabool Street hill. At night, its flare stack was like a beacon. Last night, the beacon would have been alarmingly bright, as the complex went up in flames.
Workers were forced to flee for their lives when the fire at Viva Energy Geelong Refinery erupted, with union officials warning the incident may have been caused by faulty equipment and ageing infrastructure.
The blaze broke out late on Wednesday night at the Corio facility, one of Australia’s last remaining oil refineries, sending flames into the sky and triggering an emergency response.
Workers on site ran for safety as the fire took hold, according to Australian Workers’ Union Victorian branch secretary Ronnie Hayden.
“The information we got was, they were about 500 metres away from it, they actually saw it erupting, and they had to run from it,” Mr Hayden told the Australian outside the facility.
I vividly remember the last time the complex went up, in 1979. Many of us gathered to watch the huge fireballs erupting into the night sky from across Corio Bay. The one thing we didn’t worry about was that it would cause a crippling fuel shortage.
But, back then, we were a more or less sensible country. One thing we didn’t do was recklessly shut down critical industries, in the name of a demented, unproven, ruinously costly ideological derangement. Consequently, Australia had seven oil refineries for its 15 million people. Today, thanks to successive climate-deranged governments, we have just two. Two oil refineries for a nation of 27 million.
Petrol production at one of Australia’s two oil refineries will be impacted by a blaze that broke out just after 11pm last night, Energy Minister Chris Bowen has confirmed. The fire is still burning at the Geelong facility.
If Boofhead had had his way, we wouldn’t even have the two remaining refineries at all. When Scott Morrison stepped in to keep the last two refineries open, as a matter of national security, the Climate Cult screamed blue murder. Even so, they tried to get their way by stealth, with industry policy settings that discouraged companies investing in maintenance on existing fossil-fuelled infrastructure, while pouring hundreds of billions into worse-than-useless ‘renewables’ boondoggles.
While, given the known extent of Iranian terror sponsorship here in Australia, it’s tempting to suspect foul play, it seems more likely at this stage that the foul play was in the form of wanton negligence.
“We’re concerned that it’s not a freak accident. Something went wrong in a facility that’s over 70 years old … maintenance has to be kept up and right now they do a semi reasonable job,” Mr Hayden said […]
Viva Energy chief executive Scott Wyatt says he is “confident” that shortfalls in production at the Geelong oil refinery can be offset by using imported fuels, though conceded the plant would be operating at minimum capacity for days.
Once again, Australia is reaping the dire reward of Climate Cultism. Not just in Canberra, but in Melbourne, where Lily D’Ambrosio, Minister for Climate Action, Minister for Energy and Resources and Minister for the State Electricity Commission, is an even more deranged Climate Cultist than Boofhead Bowen. D’Ambrosio not only banned new gas exploration, but tried to ban gas appliances altogether.
Rystad Energy analyst Gero Farruggio said the fire at Geelong’s oil refinery would likely push Australia into stage three of the government’s recently released national fuel security plan.
“The first thing I thought of when I saw that is that we can’t avoid stage three now … On seeing that refinery burning, getting any supplies are crucial right now and this is about 10 per cent of our domestic supplies in particular for the Victoria region, you just thought we can’t avoid moving to stage three,” he told ABC AM.
It’s almost as if there’s a deliberate conspiracy to leave this country crippled, broke and wide open to invasion, which is surely just a conspiracy theory, but…
What would they be doing any different if that was the plan?
