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It's probably down to the labor cost of smelting. Unskilled labor is prohibitively expensive in Australia compared to China. If they manage to fully automate sm
by winter_blue 8y ago
It's probably down to the labor cost of smelting. Unskilled labor is prohibitively expensive in Australia compared to China. If they manage to fully automate smelting, end to end, I don't see why the smelting wouldn't be done locally in Australia.
- vbezhenar 8y agoYou have an assumption that automatics is always cheaper than human labor. This is not obvious to me. You can have humans working 8 hour/day for as cheap as $100/month in some poor regions. And automatics still require R&D, service, electricity.
- jcampbell1 8y agoI don't think Australia has much metallurgical coal. Steel making is dirty, though Australia has plenty of places to make steel where it wouldn't cause a serious local air quality problem.
- dredmorbius 8y agoAustralia does have a lot of coal, also exported. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_Australia Metallurgical coal tends to be biuminous, which AU has much of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgical_coal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgical_coal Also: http://minerals.org.au/sites/default/files/181012%20Commodity%20Insights%20Met%20Coal%20Report.pdf http://minerals.org.au/sites/default/files/181012%20Commodit...
- andy_ppp 8y agoThey export the coal and the iron ore which I thought was super weird, different sides of the country but still...
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- throwaway2048 8y agoChina also massively subsidizes its steel industry, and produces it below cost.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]