Victoria’s 26/27 budget has announced $124.5 million to progress activities at the Victorian Renewable Energy Terminal at Hastings.
The funding will be used to progress the Environmental Effects Statement process for the first heavy-duty of its kind in Australia, a Victorian Government statement reads.
Minister for Ports and Freight Melissa Horne commented that “We are investing in the technical and environmental assessments at the Port of Hastings to ensure that we are protecting the Ramsar-listed wetlands and have ensured that we are on the best footing to successfully meet the Environmental Effects Statement criteria.”
Ramsar wetlands
Ramsar the location in Iran where the “Convention on Wetlands of International Importance” was signed with the intent of halting the worldwide loss of wetlands (swamps, marshes, billabongs, lakes, mudflats etc whether natural or artificial, permanent, temporary, freshwater, brackish, or saltwater). Wetlands support biodiversity and provide ecosystem services such as sequestering carbon, supplying freshwater for human needs, supporting food production, purifying and filtering harmful waste and pollutants and providing protection from floods and storm surges. Australia has 67 Ramsar-sites.
Western Port is a Ramsar-listed site and it is a bay incorporating 260km of coast that receives the flow from six major rivers. “The Ramsar site includes a wide variety of habitat types: deep channels, seagrass flats, intertidal mudflats, extensive mangrove thickets and saltmarsh vegetation. The white mangrove communities within Western Port are the most well-developed and extensive in Victoria and represent some of the most southerly extents of the species globally,” reads a statement from the federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. The site was listed on 15 December 198s and accounts for just under 60,000 hectares.
Enivronmental approvals
Completion of the Environmental Effects Statement will allow companies to be able to assemble turbines before taking them offshore to install. Following planning approvals and environmental assessments, works can then proceed.
“Harnessing Gippsland’s offshore wind resource has the potential to keep pushing prices down as our old coal fire power stations close. The auction for the first 2 gigawatts of offshore wind energy will open in August. That’s enough energy to power 1.5 million homes,” the Victorian government statement reads.
Port of Hastings
The Port of Hastings is located in Western Port, approximately 72 km south east of Melbourne, according to a statement from the port. Trade includes import / export of oil, liquid petroleum gas (LPG), steel and unleaded petrol. The port supports refining/fractionation plants, gas and oil storage and load-out facilities. The port is also the southern terminal for several pipelines carrying gas and oil to coastal markets, and through the Western Port Altona Geelong (WAG) Pipeline to Mobil and Shell refineries in Melbourne and Geelong. Crude oil and condensate from the Bass Strait not utilised for refining by Shell and Mobil is shipped interstate. Around 100-150 vessels are recorded at the port each year.
