A PROJECT FOR THE CENTURIES
I SAID last Saturday that the LNP candidate for Townsville, John Hathaway, had gone silent in his support for the full 14.5m raising of the Burdekin Dam. Mr Hathaway phoned to say that the raising of the dam wall to its full stage two height was still one of his No.1 end goals. He doesn’t want to raise the dam just two, three or six metres, but to its original stage two design height of another 14.6m on top of the existing 55m. Two metres would add only 550,000 megalitres to the existing capacity of 1,860,000 megalitres.
“This project should look to the future like the Snowy River scheme. It should look past 100 years. It should go for generations. It should not be looked at just in terms of a 25year pay back. If they looked at the Snowy River Scheme like that it would never have happened.
“It would bring new industries into the region and would provide a failsafe water supply for Townsville.”
Tony Manning is a retired consulting engineer. He was the Townsville-based Australian national water manager for Fortune 500 company AECOM. He was president of the Australian Water Association for 20 years and a member of the Queensland government’s Water Infrastructure Task Force. Tony told me this week that raising the dam to the full 14.6m would cost $1bn$1.5bn. It would add 6,840,000 megalitres to the dam’s existing capacity of 1,860,000 megalitres. In other words, it would be a monster.
A hydro component costing $2.5bn-$3bn would generate 500MW, enough electricity to power 300,000 homes. The 2016 census put the number of dwellings in Townsville at 80,154.
Tony Manning said if pumped hydro was incorporated into stage two, the dam would become a giant “water battery”. The capital cost of water from the built-to-capacity Burdekin Dam would be $220 per megalitre of additional water stored. Water from a proposed dam at Hells Gates on the upper Burdekin would be $2000 per megalitre capital cost.
If a state government can’t raise the Burdekin Dam the extra 14.6m it would be better to do nothing and to wait for a government that can get the job done.
Built to its original design specifications, it would be a dam for the centuries.