Forty years ago (March 5, 1982) in Victoria, a joint Japanese-Australian venture launched a liquefaction project at Morwell to convert brown coal to oil. The stimuli for the project were the savage lessons gleaned from the OPEC “oil crisis” of 1973.
The then Victorian Minister for Minerals and Energy, Digby Crozier, released a ministerial statement on “The Victorian Brown Coal Resource” in December 1981, which predicted jobs, new technologies, alternative fuels and economic benefits f…
