One of the World’s Biggest Coal and Gas Ports Is Being Tested
Robust trade through Gladstone, on Australia’s northeast coast, shows the challenges of a successful energy transition.
Gladstone Power Station, a coal-fired generator in Queensland, Australia
Photographer: David Fickling/BloombergSince before it was even really a settlement, Gladstone — a town of 65,000 people at the southern end of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef — has lived and died on the global commodity trade.
In 1859, the first major shipment over the sandbars guarding its harbor carried 60 three-year-old horses bound for India. Now one of the world’s biggest fossil fuel ports, thanks to decades of voracious demand for steelmaking coal and gas from an industrializing Asia, it is facing the biggest test yet: Whether it can reinvent itself for a world switching toward clean power.