Fuelling regional development or exporting value? The role of the gas industry on the Limestone Coast, South Australia.

The degree to which host regions benefit from resource extraction is a major issue for research and policy. In Australia and Canada, the dominant narrative of resource extraction is that most of the benefits flow away from host regions. This paper draws on evolutionary economic geography, presenting a case study of the Limestone Coast in South Australia, which previously extracted and distributed gas locally to food and fibre manufacturing industries. New policies seeking to renew the gas industry in the region, provide subsidies for exploration. Scenarios were developed to help inform decisions about the role of gas within this region. Qualitative analysis of the scenarios emphasised that gas needs to be affordable and locally accessible. Quantitative modelling showed that using the gas locally by manufacturing industries as part of broader industrial expansion would lead to greater benefits compared with exporting all gas outside the region. We conclude that policy settings have gone some way towards realising increased benefits for the region. Regional stakeholders clearly favoured the local use scenario but saw it as unlikely in the context of current infrastructure limitations. Stakeholders sought policy support for infrastructure to enable the preferred scenario to be realised.

Compiling and using input-output frameworks through collaborative virtual laboratories.

Compiling, deploying and utilising large-scale databases that integrate environmental and economic data have traditionally been labour- and cost-intensive processes, hindered by the large amount of disparate and misaligned data that must be collected and harmonised. The Australian Industrial Ecology Virtual Laboratory (IELab) is a novel, collaborative approach to compiling large-scale environmentally extended multi-region input-output (MRIO) models. The utility of the IELab product is greatly enhanced by avoiding the need to lock in an MRIO structure at the time the MRIO system is developed. The IELab advances the idea of the "mother-daughter" construction principle, whereby a regionally and sectorally very detailed "mother" table is set up, from which "daughter" tables are derived to suit specific research questions. By introducing a third tier - the "root classification" - IELab users are able to define their own mother-MRIO configuration, at no additional cost in terms of data handling. Customised mother-MRIOs can then be built, which maximise disaggregation in aspects that are useful to a family of research questions. The second innovation in the IELab system is to provide a highly automated collaborative research platform in a cloud-computing environment, greatly expediting workflows and making these computational benefits accessible to all users. Combining these two aspects realises many benefits. The collaborative nature of the IELab development project allows significant savings in resources. Timely deployment is possible by coupling automation procedures with the comprehensive input from multiple teams. User-defined MRIO tables, coupled with high performance computing, mean that MRIO analysis will be useful and accessible for a great many more research applications than would otherwise be possible. By ensuring that a common set of analytical tools such as for hybrid life-cycle assessment is adopted, the IELab will facilitate the harmonisation of fragmented, dispersed and misaligned raw data for the benefit of all interested parties.